Business

Apr 14 2013

The Ideal Profile of an Early Adopter

When you’re doing customer development, you are specifically NOT trying to understand and satisfy all of your possible users, or the total addressable market. You can deal with the whole market after you get off the ground, but you’ll never get there unless you understand and satisfy (or better yet, thrill) your early adopters. You need to find the people with your problem who feel it so acutely that they are willing to try your imperfect solution, and to help you see where it needs to be improved. These early customers are worth their weight in gold once you find them. They will be your greatest source of insight into why the product isn’t working, the most supportive when it seems like you’ll never get it right, and your loudest evangelists when you finally nail it.

Portrait of an Early Adopter

To find people with the problem you’re solving, look for five simple criteria:

They have the problem,
They know they have the problem,
EITHER they are paying for a solution currently
OR they have hacked their own together,
AND they are still unsatisfied.

If you’re talking to people who don’t meet all of these criteria, they are probably not your early adopters. They might be future customers. They might think they’ll buy your product at some future point, but that point may never come. If they aren’t willing to buy until the product is perfect, you can’t afford to focus on building the product just for them. Keep looking until you find the people who need your solution so badly they will climb on board with you before you’ve finished building the boat.

Feb 22 2013

Interview with Elliot Susel: Tech Risk + Agile

An interview with Agile expert Elliot Susel about using agile to mitigate tech risk.

Full Transcript

Teague Hopkins: Welcome. I’m Teague Hopkins. Today I’m here with Elliot Susel, the senior project manager and primary Agile evangelist for Taxi Magic, an app that helps people book ground transportation. Elliot’s an expert on Agile has worked on it for five years at Accenture and now you’re at Taxi Magic. Is that right?

Elliot Susel: That’s right.

Teague: To start off, what is Agile for people who are not familiar with it?

Elliot: The core idea behind Agile is a series of practices that help you to develop software iteratively. That’s the core idea behind the Agile methodology.

Teague: For some of our entrepreneur listeners, how can Agile help ameliorate tech risk, this idea that we’ve talked about as the challenge of whether we can actually build the things that we’re trying to build?

Elliot: As you’re working toward a technical solution there’s a number of tools from the Agile methodology that you can use to help you work iteratively and to work your way toward a solution rather than having some grand vision and being unable to test that vision until you’ve got this final product and it may fall on its face. The idea is that by having value that you can deliver incrementally by using Agile processes and working iteratively you can test your assumptions as you move along and then also refine your ideas. As it relates to technology specifically, there’s a couple things that you can start to accelerate by working iteratively. The first is that not only are you able to improve the product, you’re also able to improve the team that’s working on the product. So, one of the core Agile practices is this idea of a retrospective where the team talks about what’s going well, what’s not going well, and specific actions that we can do to improve in the future.

Teague: I know that you’ve got a couple of retrospectives that you use on a regular basis. Can you explain what your favorite one is and how it works?

Elliot: Yeah. One of the favorite retrospectives that I’ve ever done was oriented towards gaming and I said, we can make this retrospective not just an exercise where we make some columns on a whiteboard and say here’s what we liked, and here’s what we didn’t like, but we could get really creative. So, we turned it into this game where you would draw on the whiteboard anything that would accelerate us, and you would draw on the whiteboard anything that would impede us, and we were represented as a ship in the ocean. We ended up with giant squid, and fire-breathing monsters, and anchors, and airplanes, and sails, and party cakes, and all kinds of representations, and

Teague: And that still helped you get towards the goal you were getting at?

Elliot: Each one was not just a fun thing to draw, but also had with it an association. I think that the giant squid had to do with our testing, and the team then had to figure out well how do we solve this issue of testing and then they also drew something in to deal with the giant squid which was a fun exercise.

Teague: Great.

Elliot: It kept it light-hearted and it got everyone really engaged.

Teague: Uh huh. (affirmative) It sounds like a lot of this idea of working on the technology in an iterative way sort of dovetails with a lot of the Lean startup methodologies. In your experience have you seen any byplay there?

Elliot: I would say yes and no. You can do Agile without being Lean, which is unfortunate, but I would say that there’s really three roles on an Agile team. One role is the product person, the product owner more formally, where their vision and their goal is to set the vision for the team and define what the team should be building. Now a product owner may or may not be working according to Lean principles and can march the team in a direction that may or may not be consistent with Lean. There’s the scrum master whose job it is to remove impediments and to help the team move as quickly as possible.

Teague: Uh huh. (affirmative)

Elliot: And, the team whose job is ultimately to be in the iteration.

Teague: Uh huh. (affirmative)

Elliot: And the more time they spend in the iteration and not on distractions, the better.

Teague: If you were talking to somebody who’s adopting Agile for the first time or trying to adopt Agile for the first time, what would be the most important piece of advice you can give them in terms of taking their first steps?

Elliot: Find a really good coach. Find the best possible practitioner that you can actually spend time with. And, to use the words of the scrum master and practitioner that I learned from, to spend time in their dojo.

Teague: Uh huh. (affirmative)

Elliot: A scrum master really is creating an environment and it’s not just this series of practices; although the practices are important, but it’s an organizational mindset where yes the team can build incrementally and that’s lovely and that mitigates your tech risk. But, also, it helps if the product team is also thinking incrementally and how can we test our assumptions incrementally, and how can we incrementally work toward our solution in the best possible way?

Teague: Excellent. Well, thanks, Elliot, for joining us today. You can find out more about Agile, and Elliot, and Taxi Magic at Elliot’s website at www.elliotsusel.com. Thanks for listening.

This interview originally appeared in The Three Biggest Risks to Your Startup.

Feb 21 2013

The Three Biggest Risks to Your Startup

Starting any new venture is risky. Before we can limit or manage the risk, we have to understand it.

Most startup (or new product) risk can be divided into three buckets:

Tech Risk
Market Risk
Ego Risk

Tech Risk

Tech risk is what entrepreneurs (or intrapreneurs, for those starting something within an existing structure) most often think about when starting a new venture. Can I build this thing? Is it scalable? Do I have enough servers? The irony is that, especially for consumer web startups, this risk is usually negligible. Most web startups aren’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before, unless it involves patentable algorithms. It may not be easy, but there’s high certainty that it can be done, given sufficient resources.

Market Risk

Market risk is the antithesis of the idea that “if you build it, they will come.” Do people have this problem? If we can deliver the solution, will people even want it? Can we reach the people who will buy this product? Do people believe that our solution is credible? Entrepreneurs should be thinking carefully about market risk.

Ego Risk

The final type of risk facing any new venture is ego risk – and it’s probably the most important and the least discussed type of risk. Ego risk is the chance that an entrepreneur can’t get out of her or his own way, pay attention to the data, overcome cognitive biases, and avoid falling prey to a reality distortion field.

With so much risk, it’s a wonder any new venture survives (many of them don’t). But researchers and entrepreneurs have worked hard on each of these types of risks, and there are strategies for ameliorating each one.

Tech Risk + Agile

Tech risk is often mitigated with some implementation of Agile methodologies. I sat down with Agile expert Elliot Susel to ask him how entrepreneurs can get started with Agile. Listen to that interview here: See the Full Transcript.

Market Risk + Lean Startup

Minimizing market risk is the driving force behind much of the lean startup movement. By making a set of small bets in the form of lightweight experiments, entrepreneurs can validate market demand before investing in building a system to deliver a solution or product. Plus, talking to customers often helps entrepreneurs identify problems they had not originally imagined. Sometimes those new problems are more pressing for the customer, and lead to a new product with less market risk.

Ego Risk + ?

Ego risk is the final and most difficult hurdle. There’s no clear-cut answer to this challenge. Religions and philosophers have been focused on ego for millennia. But a meditation or mindfulness practice can be particularly useful in helping us step back from our impulsive reactions to external stimuli (e.g. data that challenges our preconceived notions, particularly if our self-worth is invested in being right, or in one particular self-image.)

Of course, even a zen-master-like separation from the ego doesn’t completely protect us from cognitive biases, nor does a higher IQ or more awareness of these effects. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest a correlation between higher IQ and higher susceptibility to cognitive biases. We don’t yet have any proven methods for overcoming biases, but the Wikipedia page on mitigation is very interesting reading, and a good starting point for learning more.

Feb 06 2013

Questions from Innovation Experts

Recognizing that finding the right question can be more challenging than finding the right answer, Warren Berger of Fast Company asked five innovation experts “What questions should every company ask itself?”

Our favorite responses

Tim Ogilvie: “Where is our petri dish?”

“Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is–without contaminating what you’re doing now?” In answering that question, it’s up to company leadership to “provide permission and protocols for experimentation”

Eric Ries: “How can we make a better experiment?”

Shifting emphasis from Ogilvie’s where to the how of experimentation, Ries’s question is counterintuitive for most managers, who tend to think in terms of “making products,” not “making experiments.” But as Ries points out, anytime you’re doing something new, “it’s an experiment whether you admit it or not. Because it is not a fact that it’s going to work.” … This means that instead of asking “What will we do?” or “What will we build?” the emphasis should be on “What will we learn?”

Couldn’t agree more with these two. The key to innovation is experimentation, and making it easy for employees to conduct better experiments faster is an excellent way to start.

Visit Fast Company for the full article.

Nov 18 2012

Certainty in Lean Startups

Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are experiments, but not the kind you learned in school. You won’t get statistically significant results that could be published in a peer-reviewed journal – but you will get the kind of information that can help you make a choice about your next move.

In business, the scientific method doesn’t give you proof or absolute certainty. It doesn’t make the decision for you. It does reduce uncertainty to let you place smarter bets. A small amount of data can get you from 50/50 to 25/75, and that’s a big difference.

If you think of starting a company as playing blackjack, then lean startup is counting cards. You still have to make the bet, and you’re still going to lose sometimes. But by playing smarter – by making a series of small bets, and betting bigger when you’re more certain of the outcome – you can tilt the odds of winning in your favor.