Customer Development = The pursuit of customer understanding Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business.  The goal of listening to customers is not please every one of them.  It’s to figure out which customer segment served his needs – both short and long term. And

I work on lots of new ideas for companies. I’ve developed the following tool that helps me (and it seems many others) to quickly develop and evaluate these ideas. In the simplest form, it helps create an elevator pitch, (e.g. for www.gist.com – We focus on relationship-centric

Finding the right early users can make or break a startup. If you find the wrong people, they will either waste your time with irrelevant suggestions or could easily send you off in the wrong direction. Here are a few suggestions on strategies to find the best early users. 1.

Today I participated in an annual call with The Corum Group, a Seattle based M&A group focused on trends and opportunities for 2012 across the broad software, internet and mobile spaces. I was part of a panel that included some friends and people I really respect, including; * Dan

To create a great and successful company, marking and communicating your progress to yourself, your team and your supporters is critical. Here are a few things that have worked well for me; – communicate every 2 weeks – this allows you to make meaningful progress, is a good frequency for your supporters

I have been spending a bunch of time with the teams at Techstars Seattle.  It is exciting to see all the progress as we approach demo day on Nov 3, where all the teams show off their companies and plans for world domination.Here are a few things that I

We are well into the Techstars Seattle season and I have been spending lots of time with many of the teams. As part of our discussions, we have been talking about how to simplify the pitches as well as capture all the different ideas and put them into context. One

Recently, with the help of Mike Folden, I recorded this video on the “Future of Work” in an attempt to capture many of the things we have learned over the last few years both building Gist and interacting with many of the key thought leaders in the space. Another key

I really like software tools that make me more efficient. Over the last few months I have really come to love and rely on Text Expander and Mind manager. Text Expander helps me quickly insert text blocks, mostly into emails. I have a few scripts that I use all the

At Gist, we have a team of just north of 20 very productive people, investors and advisors. We run an Agile development shop and try to apply Agile to everything we do. A fundamental value/activity of Agile is the lowly “status report”. Status reports are critical to keep everyone