Blog posts about lean startup, growth hacking, SaaS, cloud computing, devops, social media marketing and more.
In a recent blog post, we described how to create, use and adapt customer segments as part of a Lean Startup approach. Since then we received a few requests asking whether it would be possible to get away without it. After all, all that research and talking to prospects and customers takes up a lot of time. Let’s have a look at what you might miss out without ...
Read more...
Posted: Monday, August 4, 2014 12:31:07 AM UTC
When I wrote on attitude, it was also because attitude is a critical factor for pushing quality to the next level. While one might get the impression that quality doesn’t seem to mean a lot to some people, it is important to realize that approaches such as continuous deployment and devops require a new level of quality. Let’s have a closer look.
In a more traditi...
Read more...
Posted: Sunday, July 27, 2014 10:54:44 PM UTC
Hiring the right people is one of the most critical decisions for every company and every team. Many different approaches have been invented and tried. Probably most of them work, ... well sort of. In this post I would like to direct your attention to attitude, also because I have quite good experiences with people who I hired also based on their attitude.
Sir Peter Blake was one of the most successful yachtsmen in the world. Talking about attitude. For ma...
Read more...
Posted: Monday, July 14, 2014 8:52:00 PM UTC
The idea of Growth Hacking is that you collect data, analyze it, focus on one number, and improve that number. That number should not be some arbitrary number. Instead this number should be related to your funnel. For example it could be one of the Pirate metrics:
If you are at the very beginning you may have an idea of how this works conceptually. However, you may not know what the specific, let alone optimized, funnel looks like for your particula...
Read more...
Posted: Sunday, June 29, 2014 9:10:23 AM UTC
Introduction: While there are many different ingredients to your business model, there are few that are as important as understanding who you are selling your product or providing your service offerings to. Unless you can clearly define who your target audience is, it will be challenging to focus your scarce resources on activities towards that market. Sometimes you may find multiple distinct groups that would benefit from your offering. Each of these groups can be described by particular dem... Read more...
Posted: Sunday, May 18, 2014 10:27:00 AM UTC
Partnerships make your startup stronger. Sounds good, but honestly, why would you want to partner with other people or businesses?
One very good reason can be to obtain access to expertise, skills, resources, etc. that you don’t have yourself or that you do not want to focus on. For example, you may need a graphical designer for your web site. Perhaps you are very gifted and would be able to do the entire branding of your business yourself. Howeve...
Read more...
Posted: Saturday, January 25, 2014 4:17:00 PM UTC
Now that we know that for starting a business an awesome idea is not enough, the question becomes, what do we do about it? As always there are several schools of thoughts, e.g. some people suggest creating a proper business plan. That business plan has to meet varying requirements depending on the target audience and other factors. It can be as short as a few pages or it can be quite detailed...
Read more...
Posted: Wednesday, January 15, 2014 12:31:00 AM UTC
So now you’ve got that awesome business idea. You have told everybody about it, whether they asked for it or not. They are all excited about it. You are even more passionate about your idea than ever before.
Is that enough?
Like a good tasting meal starting a business takes many different ingredients. Having an excellent idea is an important ingredient but not enough to cook the entire meal.
Another important ingredient is the ability to execu...
Read more...
Posted: Tuesday, January 7, 2014 2:59:00 PM UTC