Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

The Secret to Getting Any Job You Want: Focus

6 May 2012

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This post originally appeared on The Next Great Generation. I’m reposting here to share and save what I think is one of the most important skills I’ve learned as a member of Gen Y.

Whether on the subway, at home with family for the holidays or talking with friends, I often hear the same thing:

     “It’s so hard to find a job right now…”

     “I applied to 100 jobs on Monster.com and heard nothing!”

     “I applied to every job I could find and I couldn’t even get a phone interview!”

In the last 4 years, during a recession that crushed our generation in the employment market (over 17% unemployment for Gen Y) I have landed three different, awesome jobs. What makes it particularly interesting are the following facts:

  1. Each job I applied for was a reach based on my existing skills.
  2. Each job was the only job I applied for at the time.
  3. Each company ended up giving me a different job than I initially applied for, but that was an even better fit than what I started out going after.
No matter how hard you focus on getting a job, there are still only 24 hours a day. I have the same constraints as you. The problem is, when you apply for 100 jobs, you’re spreading your energy across 100 companies, while when I apply for one job, I’m focusing all of my energy on one company. That concentrated energy gets you noticed and gets you the job. How is this possible? In simplest terms, it’s all about focus.

Let’s look closer. I’m sharing all my secrets for getting the perfect job:

Step 1: Choosing the right company.

There are thousands of companies out there and especially as our economy finally recovers, many of them are hiring. For those of you who applied to 100 jobs, you know this is true.  What really matters though is picking one company that you really want to work for.

It’s up to you to decide what matters most to you. Is it location? Company size? The market they work in? You want to choose the two or three most important things and use that to filter the companies you see that are hiring. Then you should dig into the company closer and see who gets you excited. Every company has an “About” page full of information about who they are. Keep searching until one of them stands out for you. If you’re going to put a ton of effort into pursuing one job, then you should make sure it’s a job you really want.

Step 2: Plan your attack.

Applying for a job is a lot more than writing a cover letter and submitting a resume. If you are going all in on one job, you need to do some serious prep.

Start by tearing apart their website. Then Google them. Learn everything you can about them. Pretend you have to give a major presentation for a class about them. Next, research the people you may be working with; if you’re a designer, look up other designers at the company, if you’re in HR or marketing, look at those departments specifically.

Step 3: Fire the first shot.

As you do your research on the company, see if you know anyone who works there or if you have a close friend/mentor/family member who knows someone there. If they do, ask for their help in getting an introduction into the company. Ideally, you want it to be someone in the department you’re applying to (if the company is big enough to have departments), but work with whatever you have.

Completing this step means getting an intro to someone in the right department. The real trick to succeeding in an interview is getting past the mess of general applications.  An intro directly to the person hiring is how the pros get it done; they end up at the top of the proverbial resume stack…unlike the “spray and pray” kids from Monster.com that never get past the inbox.

Step 4: Follow up with value.

Now that you’ve submitted a great resume and cover letter tailored to the company and target job along with that intro to someone in your target department, it’s time to take your game to another level.  You’re now going to create content to add value to your (hopefully) future employer.

The goal with the content you create is to show competence in the job you hope to do for them and also show an understanding of their company and their present challenges. If you’re a designer, perhaps it’s feedback on the design of some of their site or a proposed new design for something they have. If you’re a developer, you could make a small app with their API and include feedback on how they could make the API better.

If you’re on the business side, try submitting feedback on their product from a user perspective or even gather some insights from their market that would be valuable to your target supervisor.

Another great trick I’ve used is to literally tell them what I’d do if I had the job.  I once submitted a 7 page document full of ideas of how a startup could engage its community and build buzz. It made for great conversation fodder in the interview and made me stand out against candidates who had more impressive work experience than I did. Startups love do-ers and this showed I was someone who got things done and had my own initiative.

Step 5: Double down and be persistent.

The great thing about submitting all this content to your target employer is that when you’re following up to find out where you are in the interview process, you’re not just bugging them, you’re sending them something of value. Each time you follow up in the process, try to have something of value to give them along with the ping. It will keep you on their radar and impress them with your persistence.

Do you have time to follow up with potential employers when you submit 100 resumes? Obviously not, which is why your new tactic of following up and adding value will stand out so much.

Step 6: Crush the interview and close.

With all the goodwill you’ve built up by getting a good introduction to someone on the team you want to join and submitting valuable content to them, you’re extremely likely to get brought in for a full interview.  When you do, your goal is to show you’re as good in person as you are in all the electronic interactions you’ve now had.

When you come to the interview, come ready for everything. Find out everyone you’re interviewing with and research all of them like you already did the company you want to work for. Have something interesting to talk to each person about that shows you did your homework on them. Refresh yourself on all the research you’ve already done and be prepared to talk about and build upon the ideas you submitted in the content you’ve produced.

The great thing about all this effort is that on top of impressing everyone at the company, you should have a very clear idea of what the company is like and be ready to contribute in a big way from day one.

Step 7: What if I don’t get the job?!?

So there is is always the chance that despite all your efforts, you won’t get the job, it’s rare, but it does happen. What’s great is that very often when someone puts in this kind of effort a person hiring will do one of two things:

1) Try to find another job for you so the company can still hire you.

2) Refer you to someone in their network that could hire you.

I have personally experienced scenario 1) twice in my career and have friends who have ended up very happy in roles that came from referrals in scenario 2).

If all else fails, brush your shoulders off and move on to the next job. This much hustle is guaranteed to pay off sooner rather than later.

How would you recommend standing out in the job applicant crowd? Have you found a job and have advice to offer? Tell us in the comments!

Connecting the Dots: How a Boston Connector Landed at an SF Startup

13 March 2012

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“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech, May 2005

One of the most common questions I’ve heard over the past few weeks from younger members of our community, especially students, is how to build a career in startups. Unlike climbing the corporate ladder, it’s not a straight forward, linear process. As I just made a major move in my career to join KISSmetrics, I’d like to share how I ended up going from Boston startup connector to SF Product Manager.  This will also help answer questions I know some of you have about how I landed this job.

Connecting the Dots – The unorthodox journey of one startuper

To really begin this story, you have to go back to my days at oneforty. When I joined oneforty, I was given the title of Customer Development Manager and asked to help make oneforty a Lean Startup. Since I had only spent a few months working part time with John Prendergast as his cust dev intern, I really had very little experience. Laura Fitton, oneforty’s founder, took a leap of faith I could learn it, but she also was wise enough to know I could not do it alone.  That’s why she set me up to have mentors from day 1.

Immediately upon starting at oneforty, Laura connected me with two Valley Lean experts she got to know while she was out west raising money for oneforty and Pivotal Labs worked to build V1.0 of the site.  These people were internet mentor legends, Dan Martell and Hiten Shah.  Once a month I seemed to find myself on the phone getting what I would happily call an “ass-kicking” from Dan helping me realize all the things I was doing wrong and most importantly, could do to improve my custdev methods.  Roughly every other month I would have a similar discussion with Hiten.

These discussions were priceless in my career development. I would take copious amounts of notes and seriously reflect upon what Hiten and Dan discussed with me each time. I would also share these notes with Laura to make sure I truly understood them and to force myself to teach someone what I learned (a great tool for deepening your understanding).

A Chance Meeting

Fast forward 12 months at oneforty and it is April 2011. I’ve learned a ton about customer development and lean startups, enough that Trevor Owens, founder of Lean Startup Machine (which was just getting off the ground at the time) invited me to be a mentor at the Lean Startup Machine event in New York City. As destiny/fate/karma would have it, Hiten Shah was also one of the mentors for the weekend.

Being a mentor traveling in from another city is very different from mentoring in your home city. When you’re in your city, you likely only stop by for a brief period of time that fits your schedule. But, when you go to another city, you find you spend the vast majority of your time there…which both Hiten and I did in New York City.

After Saturday’s activities wrapped up, all the mentors went out for drinks.  This turned into an audition and test for me.

With Hiten Shah to my right and Patrick Vlaskovits (co-author of the awesome Lean book at custdev.com) grilling me on all sorts of topics from lean startups, to lessons learned at my first real startup job to topics on psychology and body language.  At the time I was dead set on leaving oneforty to start my own company so all Hiten said was, “if you raise money for your idea, come out west and I’ll give you some intros.”  He also encouraged me to quit ASAP to start doing my own thing if that’s what I was passionate about. Coincidentally I did just that on Monday back in Boston.

Out on my own, but on the Radar

After leaving oneforty, I set out to start my company I’ve always dreamed of.  After spinning my tires for 6 months though, I found myself pretty empty handed and a bit discouraged. After a meeting with Sim Simeonov, I refocused my efforts on the lean startups movement.  After a month of interviews and discussions, I published the results, which caught Hiten’s eye when they were tweeted out.

Hiten DM’d me after my first post and we had a call to discuss my findings, which confirmed his suspicious: Lean as a concept is far ahead of actual solid execution of it in the startup world. At the end of the chat, I mentioned that I was planning a trip out to the Valley in early December and asked if we could meet while I was in town.  He agreed.

Meeting in SF and an Offer

When I met with Hiten in December during my Valley trip, we barely talked about KISSmetrics or my potentially working there. The vast majority of our one hour chat was about my strengths and weaknesses and where I was at in my startup career.

Hiten tried to sell me on the idea that coming to the Valley would solve many of my problems, but I presented a series of challenges that I felt prevented it from being the right decision for me.  He countered I could come work for him and it would resolve many of them. I noted the offer, and it did intrigue me, but it mostly sat just sat in the back of my mind.

By the end of the trip, I was much more interested, thinking it may be the next logical step in my career. On the flight back, I emailed Hiten expressing great interest in the role, especially as I discovered I could potentially be filling the shoes of the departed Cindy Alvarez (who just weeks before my visit had left KISSmetrics to join Yammer).

Getting Serious

With the holidays fast approaching, Hiten and I took things slowly, talking about the the potential first in loose terms then in much more specifics. After one phone call where Hiten lifted the proverbial kimono on everything I wanted to ask regarding KISSmetrics as a business, all that was left was an answer to the question, “When can you come meet more of my team for an interview?“

With that, I booked tickets to take a quiet trip to SF for the interview in early February.

Sealing the Deal

With an interview scheduled and a focus on landing this job, I employed my proven job acquisition system that requires me to produce, insightful, valuable content for KISSmetrics.  I happened to be reading a psychology book at the time and so I produced a massive document on different ways KISSmetrics could improve their site based on the principles I found in the book.  I also aggregated all my lean learnings in one place so the rest of the team could see the credibility in Lean that Hiten knew I had.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in the interview. All I had were the names of the people I would be talking to and a vague idea that we’d talk about the KISSmetrics product.  Most of the interview turned out to be focused on implementation: how would you do this, what’s wrong with that, what would you do in this circumstance.

Despite not really preparing for such questions, I was able to crush the interview for one simple reason: the last startup idea I had worked on was a Lean Product Management tool.  While the idea didn’t pan out, it led to me talking to 40 people who run product at companies. Through this, I picked up on many best practices and common mistakes. I was armed with more than enough fodder for the interview and believe I’m really armed to take on my first full time product role.

Conclusion – You Never Know…

Whether it’s lessons learned in a failed startup idea’s customer development interviews or an event you’re randomly invited to in another city, you never know what will lead to the next great opportunity in your career.  Startups are all about embracing serendipity. Embrace the machine and you never know where you’ll end up.

Do you have an example of unrelated events that looking back were instrumental in a step or moment in your career?

Is Wentworth more entrepreneurial than Harvard and all of the UMass schools combined?

15 February 2012

I was looking at the numbers today for the Boston Tech Talent Fair coming next Wednesday and was very excited: over 400 job seekers signed up and 30 companies committed to attend hiring for both internships and full time roles in business and engineering roles.  But what was interesting was when I looked at the numbers for which schools had the most signups…

BU – 81
Hult – 67
Tufts – 42
Babson – 36
BC – 28
MIT – 26
Northeastern – 15
UMass Boston – 12
Wentworth – 11
RISD – 7
Yale – 7
HBS – 6
Harvard – 6
MIT Sloan – 5
Suffolk – 4
Brandeis – 4
UMass Amherst – 4
UMass Lowell – 3
Brown – 2
Bryant – 2
BYU – 2
Emerson – 2

So a big high five to the folks at Hult International Business School, Tufts, Babson and home team, BU. But wow…there’s some serious under-representation at all of the UMass schools, Harvard, Suffolk, Brandeis, Bentley, and Olin...who didn’t even have one sign up…ouch!

So, if you go to any of these schools and know anyone you can help spread the word to…please do! I know Harvard, Suffolk, UMass and the other basement dwellers on the list have more entrepreneurial students than this! We all know at least one professor, student group leader or administrator at our alma maters we could pass this along to.

To make it easy, here’s a message you can use:

Hi <name>,

I wanted to let you know that there’s a big Startup Career Fair put on by the people over at Greenhorn Connect next Wednesday, February 22nd at the BU School of Management right at the Kenmore T stop.  If you or any entrepreneurial minded students are looking for an internship or full time job, this is a great opportunity to meet 30 growing Boston area companies!

<Your School> is way behind the leading schools in registration and I wanted to help show we have lots of great students interested in startups too!

You can learn more about the event and sign up here: http://www.greenhornconnect.com/careers/Boston-Talent-Fair

Thanks!

—

So consider this a little social experiment and request to help us pack the place on Wednesday!  If we want our ecosystem to finally fix our student retention problem, events like these have to be big successes and that starts by getting the students aware and out the door heading to them!

I appreciate all your help and the communities support to get us this far!

The Concept – Product Chasm: The End of my Lean Product Management Tool & Rediscovery of Passion’s Importance

11 February 2012

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For the past couple of months I’ve been working on ideas in the lean startup space. As explained in previous posts, it seemed logical: I have a solid background in it from my days at oneforty as well as consulting before and after and the subject is hot now with Eric Ries’s book out, Steve Blank’s book coming soon and a seeming never-ending discussion about the principles in our community.

After initially exploring the opportunity to provide tools for performing customer development, I pivoted to the broader idea of providing a tool to help with Lean Product Management. Initially, the response was great; I wrote a blog post on the concept of Lean Product Management and it was universally loved. It’s the most read blog post on my blog ever and it generated significant inbound interest.  At the same time, I talked to quite a few people that had interesting feedback on the process and where they were coming up short. I also met a number of people and companies that needed help in the areas I was looking for the product to work. However, in the end, a few major issues are leading me to place this idea on the scrap heap with the other previous 8 ideas I’ve evaluated over the past year.

The Concept – Product Chasm

The biggest problem in developing this idea was a major gap between the buy-in to the concept I wrote about and the actual execution of the concept.

In the product management world, it seems everyone has a different way of implementing it. Some people are absolutely hardcore and have impeccable wikis and project management tools (like a 1-2 punch of Jira and Confluence). Others keep it loose with simply a Google Spreadsheet and a Kanban board (both real and virtual).  Finally others have utter chaos and have absolutely destroyed their project management tool by jamming everything in there (usually Pivotal Tracker or BaseCamp).  It seems individuality is greatly valued in the world of product management…

This presents a series of problems:

1) There is no silver bullet

The difference between a Kanban board and a wiki based product management tool is significant. This would mean any tool that was valuable for one is unlikely to be interesting to the other.

2) Marketing is a nightmare

With everyone having their own ideas on how to implement product management principles, targeting and acquiring a customer would be extremely difficult. Even those that I confidently believed had problems in their process often either A) did not perceive there was a problem or B) even if they knew they had a problem, they weren’t actively seeking a solution.

3) There was no MVP

As I talked to over 40 people who owned product at their company, I found no consensus on what part of the process was broken for them; without this consensus, there was no way to build an MVP. More importantly, the lack of consensus showed no agreement on a core problem which could be used as the tip of the spear towards acquiring customers and building out a platform over time; building a Lean Product Management tool would take significant time to become a complete, full life cycle solution, but there was no clear path for doing so.

A Greater Problem – Passion?

One of the most fascinating things about my trip to Silicon Valley in December was seeing how entrepreneurs interact with one another there versus here in Boston. Specifically, I’m talking about the first questions an entrepreneur is asked about their startup/idea. There is no right or wrong here, just different.

In Boston, common questions are:

  1. What stage are you at?
  2. How will you make money?
  3. Do you have any customers?

In the Valley, common questions are:

  1. Why are you passionate about this idea?
  2. How will you acquire customers?
  3. What is the big vision for your idea?

Of all the questions, the one I found most jarring was, “Why are you passionate about this idea?”

Over the past 9 months of questing for an idea, I’ve been attacking ideas with laser focus and rigid customer development methodology. While this has likely saved me a lot of time on any of the ideas, it also was devoid of the thought of passion; was I ever really passionate about an idea in the moving industry or restaurant services? Being completely honest with myself, I don’t believe I was.

Rebooting – a Focus on Passion

Paul Graham, amongst many others, has always said, “solve the problem you wish someone would solve for you.” I actually have an Evernote full of “hack project ideas” that are just that. I plan to start looking hard at those ideas and working on approaches to test those ideas.

Jason Baptiste wrote a blog post back before Cloudomatic (which came right before he and his cofounder discovered the OnSwipe opportunity) which covered a series of ideas he was thinking about. He got a great response from people showing who also cared about the ideas. I may do the same soon.

Embracing Fate

I had a great conversation with Eric Paley after a Dart Dinner early this past fall about my struggles to find an idea. He told me, “I think founders have to believe in a little fate; the right idea will find you at the right time.”

Those words have stuck with me and ring true with my first real venture: Greenhorn Connect. I could not have had that idea come to me at a better time both personally (it was the only way for me to build credibility in the Boston startup ecosystem and land a job 4 months later at oneforty) and for the ecosystem (October 2009 was the very beginning of our ecosystem’s awesome resurgence…the perfect time for a uniting site).

More importantly, I wasn’t even looking to start something when Greenhorn Connect happened. It just grabbed me and I couldn’t not do it. As many of you who knew me then may remember, I was a man possessed to make it work. Despite all the obvious reasons not to do it, I still did it (Lean Startups principles would have definitely it shot down). I will never forget my first Mass Innovation Night after launch and Adam Marchick and Michael Cohen both giving me the proverbial “You’re crazy. Why are you doing this?” speech. Both are great converts now, but it was only the passion and a touch of fate/destiny/luck that really possessed me to so blindingly go after the idea.

After 9 months of trying to force ideas, I’m trying to get back to basics. I need to find my passions and try to let the right idea find me instead of desperately grasping in the dark for ideas or trying to force an idea through the grinder.  A quote from Drew Huston has stuck with me in this process.  He said that of all the 5 or 6 companies he’s started, only Dropbox felt like, “the wind was at our back.”  That feels telling and reminds me of the commonly discussed need of Skill, Luck and Timing to build a truly great company.

Alternate directions

It’s been 9 very long months since I left oneforty. While even today I have a runway left that most young entrepreneurs would envy, I’m realistic about my endeavor to start something; how long should you stick with it before you realize the timing isn’t right?

The great entrepreneurs say it takes Skill, Luck and Timing to build a great company. I believe I have the skill to build a great company, which is why I left oneforty. I was also inspired by this oft-tweeted blog post encouraging you to quit your job and start a company even if you don’t have an idea. However, as time continues to slip by, I ask myself if I’m making the most of my time.

That’s why I’m beginning to evaluate working opportunities for the first time since I started this process.

I’ve thought a lot about the framework of what I’m looking for; not needing the money gives me the luxury of weighting all my other priorities over compensation. I’ve realized the most important things to me are:

  1. Working on a really big idea
  2. Working with a truly great leader I can learn from
  3. Having the opportunity to further develop skills that are assets to a business founder

No Regrets

I have ZERO regrets of how I’ve spent my time since leaving oneforty. I’ve learned a tremendous amount about myself, what I need in a technical cofounder and thanks to this most recent idea, how to manage product. I’ve also continued to build my network which is filled with mentors I know I can count on for help when I need it and people I can’t wait to invite to join me in working on that great ideaI know I’m going to find.

Like Steve Jobs said in his Stanford Graduation speech, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”  If you found me 3 years ago and told me I’d have done the things I’ve accomplished thus far, I wouldn’t believe you. However, looking back I can see how critical each step was in this crazy journey. Frankly, the less logical the next step, the more it seems to have worked out for the best.

I can’t wait to see what’s next and hope you’ll stay tuned; my beliefs are unshaken: I will build a great anchor company one day.

Leadership Lessons in Real Life: Leading by Example

31 January 2012

I’m a leadership junkie. Nothing fires me up quite like a good example of leadership, especially if it comes in the face of adversity.  It’s probably why I love so many cheesy sports movies like The Replacements and Hoosiers. They’re all chock full of leadership lessons. As art imitates life, it’s fitting this weekend I witnessed some truly profound leadership right in front of me at a soccer game.

Setting the Stage:

I play on an indoor soccer team as part of the Boston Ski and Sports Club. It’s nothing fancy and to the outside world, it’s pretty meaningless. But to those of us that play it has a lot of meaning. Many of us grew up playing sports and continued all through high school and college. There’s a void left by that only filled by finding a team sport to play even after school.

The team I’m on is pretty special. No egos. No dead weight. Just a bunch of athletes that enjoy playing with each other and find that perfect balance between hyper competitiveness and having fun.

That mix combined with a little luck found us in the championship game of our league this past Sunday. We were coming off one of our best performances of the year in our 5-3 semifinal victory, so we were pretty confident entering the game.  Things did not go as planned, but thanks to a great example of leadership in its purest form all was not lost.

Struggles and Setbacks:

In the first half we stumbled a bit to a 0-1 deficit. At halftime we all talked about how we just needed to finish a few opportunities and we’re in it. We were a little discouraged to have not scored yet, but confident in our abilities to have a solid second half.

Unfortunately, the second half started off very poorly. Within minutes of the half starting an errant play by me led to an own-goal. Seizing the momentum, just a minute after that, another goal was scored as our defense looked lost.

We hung our heads. Down 0-3 with 20 minutes left. But one of us refused to relent. Rob was more fired up than ever. He kept encouraging all of us to keep fighting. There was plenty of time to come back. He started chasing down every ball within range and ripping shots every chance he got.  The opponent’s momentum was stopped when Rob ripped his first goal to bring us within 2 goals.

Rob then subbed out after a lengthy shift and not long after a fourth goal came. down 1-4, just 15 minutes left. While the rest of us looked beaten and thought we were toast, Rob was more passionate than ever.  He ran down balls, beat defenders and kept pushing. At first the rest of the team didn’t respond. He was like a one man wrecking crew, but playing 1 on 5.

The Turning Point:

With Rob running around the field like a maniac for a few minutes finally another player on our team started making big plays too. Soon after another joined in and before we knew it, we had the whole team challenging every ball and pushing hard on goal.

Not long after, Rob got his second goal of the night. After the goal he ran right by our bench yelling at all of us to get fired up and get ready to come in and make a play too.

It worked. With 8 minutes left, down 2-4, Brandon dribbled hard into the defense and was taken down inside the box. Penalty kick. Like a man on fire, Rob convinced Brandon to let him take the shot, which he quickly buried in the back of the net. Now down by just 1 goal, Rob got a little crazy.

In outdoor soccer, when you’re down with little time left, you’ll often grab the ball after you score and bring it back to the mid line so the other team can’t stall waiting to kick off. Fired up after his goal and desperate to keep our momentum, Rob attempted to take the ball from our opponent and run it up. A near fight ensued that got our whole bench fired up and fortunately led to no penalties.

Completing the Comeback:

After the post-goal scuffle, there was no doubt that everyone on our team was ready to do whatever it took to tie the game. As a team we won every 50-50 ball in the open field and even took some 40-60 balls from them. We wanted it. Bad. Rob’s passion had infected the whole team and there was nothing our opponent could do about it.

With just 4 minutes left, a quick save by our keeper with a throw up the sideline led to a fast break. A quick give and go then led to a shot from the corner which Brandon buried in the back of the net. Tie game.

With all the momentum in our favor we pushed hard to try to win before time ran out, but unfortunately we were unable to settle it in regulation.

Overtime in our league means straight to Penalty Kicks (PKs). Leading the way once again, Rob scored our first PK, and went on to lead encouragement of our goalie and other shooters. A clutch save by our keeper and 3 straight goals made led us to a 3-2 victory in PKs.

The Moral of the Story:

Leadership is not about what happens when times are easy. It is what you do when the times are tough that matters. When the rest of the team was ready to give up, Rob refused to lose.  When no one else seemed to have any fight left in them, Rob continued to lead by example, challenging every ball, running hard on every play and encouraging everyone.  Eventually, he got others to join in and soon everyone was believing again and putting everything they had into the game.

No matter your challenge, realize that leadership means flying in the face of group think (the game is over) and being bold enough to stick with it long enough for others to join you and change your situation, whether that be a soccer comeback, your company on the ropes, or dancing on a hill (my favorite TED talk ever, below):

How Do You Get Back on the Customer Development Horse?

18 January 2012

2 Comments

Note: This post originally appeared on GreenhornConnect.com on July 27, 2011. I’m organizing all my customer development posts from GHC on here for easy reference (see the Lean Startups tab).

It happens to us all. Your startup is cruising along, or at least you’re really busy running in a million directions. Maybe you’ve also got pulled away with some personal issues like selling your home, caring for children or relationship challenges. No matter what the cause, you get away from the most important thing: Getting outside the building and talking to customers.

So knowing that you have dropped the ball and need to pick it up again, what do you do? How do you get back on the customer development horse?

How Do You Get Back on the Customer Development Horse?

Step 1: Review your previous notes

The first thing you should do is go over all of your past customer development work. Look at how you’ve already progressed and jog your memory on what you have already learned. This should include previous raw interview notes, any summaries of those notes and progress from your Lean Canvas.

This is a good time to find out if you’re taking good enough notes! If you can’t efficiently figure out what you learned, than anyone else using your notes, canvas and summaries can’t either.  A great Lean Startup should be keeping their team and their advisors up to date on customer development progress and most of what they’ll have to go on are these notes.

Step 2: Schedule new customer development interviews

Once your memory is set (this should hopefully only take an hour or two if you’re organized) then go back and see if you had any outstanding interviews to shedule. This is your low hanging fruit to schedule meetings. Reconnect with these people immediately and schedule new meetings with them as soon as possible.

Customer development is a numbers game, so regardless of if you had oustanding interviews, you need to get more feelers out for additional people to talk to; not everyone you reach out to will respond.

Here are a few ways I’ve found work to get more customers to talk to:

1) Your Early Adopters: Ask any of your early adopter users to talk if you haven’t talked to them (also get product feedback if you haven’t connected with them lately).

2) Ask Past Interviewees for Intros: Ask any past customer development interviewees that fit the problem you’re solving if they know anyone they could intro you to. (You should ask this at the end of any interview…it has a 4x success rate of responses compared to cold emailing.) In general, people want to be helpful and if you really are working on solving one of their problems, they’ll be happy to connect you with someone they know that also has the same problem.

3) Cold Email: Cold email, call or walk into the buildings of your potential customers. Unfortunately, this mode has a particularly low success rate (expect a 10-20% response rate on cold emails at best, but 5% isn’t unusual) so be prepared to have to do a lot to get results. I usually email 10-20 people at a time expecting a few responses.

If you know a good blog post on tips for cold emails for customer development, let me know and I’ll link to it here.

4) Use the Reverse Lead Model:  I’ve recently fell in love with the reverse lead model: if your startup serves a group their has their own customers that your tech supports (such as a real estate agent software that helps them interact with homeowners or moving company software for booking moving deals), then pretend to be a lead for your target customer (ie- pretend to be a homeowner or someone about to move).  Then turn the tables when they call you.

The trick I’ve found is when they call play along at first but be chatty. Pretend you’re still selling your house or moving, but then ask them about the software they use as you talk. As this first friendly conversation goes their way…then switch it up to talk about the problems you think they have and see if they confirm. If they do then pitch your product and try to get a face to face meeting (or separate phone call with a decision maker) to talk more.

Trust me, this works. I’ve actually had people complain to me about their software in these conversations…talk about a self-identified problem!

Note: This will take time. I’ve found that it generally takes a week to week and a half to get back into scheduled interviews; if you start emailing on Monday, you’re unlikely to have a full plate of interviews until the middle of the following week.

Step 3: Get your customer development questions updated

Now that you’ve started filling up your schedule with more customer development opportunities, you should determine what your goals are to discover in your current round of customer development.

Go back to your Lean Canvas and look at where you stand in testing assumptions. Remember that the goal is to test the riskiest assumptions you’ve made.  If you’ve already verified some, then you should begin testing new assumptions.

Great customer development starts with a good script of questions. It will make you more confident and comfortable in the interviews and make sure you don’t forget to ask something important.  You can (and should) go off script based on where the discussion takes you, but this is your anchor to bring you back to the key things you want to discover.

Step 4: Set a routine for staying on the horse in the future

In the end, the hope is you won’t fall off the horse again. The best way to do that is to set yourself a plan to keep it in your routine.  This can be as simple as carving out a few hours one day a week to review customer development progress and see how many interviews you have upcoming. If you drop below what you find is an acceptable number of pending interviews, go back to Step 2 and try to get a few more in the pipeline.

You can also give yourself an added boost with some external accountability by setting up to regularly update others on your customer development. At oneforty, I sent out bi-monthly reports to the entire team on key takeaways from customer development and updated the management team every 4-5 interviews. This ensured the whole team was up to date and I had extra motivation to try to keep customer development cranking.

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Getting outside the building is never easy, but if you’re committed to being a lean startup, you have to stay on top of it. It’s easy to get distracted by other responsibilities. When that happens, now you know what to do.

What advice do you have for Lean Startups trying to maintain a routine of customer development?

Lessons Learned in Customer Development

18 January 2012

Note: This post originally appeared on GreenhornConnect.com on September 9, 2010. I’m organizing all my customer development posts from GHC on here for easy reference (see the Lean Startups tab).

“Customers live outside the building.” Every startup is well served to remember this and make sure they’re reaching out to their customers/users to understand them.  As customer development manager at oneforty, I’m on the front lines of that effort and our overall goal of implementing Lean Startups methodologies.  I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned along the way.

Lessons Learned in Customer Development

1) Ask the right questions the right way.

One of the key tools in customer development is the user interview.  At its heart, you’re trying to understand what problems your users have and how your startup may solve some of them.  The greatest challenge in these interviews is keeping the discussion focused on user problems and frustrations instead of features and their ideas for solutions; users are notoriously bad at suggesting features they need or would actually use, so you absolutely need to focus on what problems are behind those feature requests.

There are some great contributions in the blogosphere to help guide you in preparing your interview questions:

2) You manage what you measure.

In addition to interviews, metrics are the other big piece of customer development. You have to understand what’s happening on your site and decide what aspects you will work to improve and in what order.

The best way we’ve found to track this is to consider everything under Dave McClure’s AARRR model.  There are all kinds of numbers we can measure on oneforty, but by grouping them into categories of Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue, a clearer picture of the meaning of all the numbers is formed.  We then take those numbers and focus our engineering sprints on improvements in one of those categories at a time.  This helps engineering understand what they’re building while also making it easier for us to measure for improvements based on those efforts.

3) Communication is key…inside and out!

While Jeremy and I dive into the metrics on oneforty each week in great detail and I interview many users to understand their problems, that’s just the beginning of the work for customer development.  It is essential that what is discovered is shared with the team in a concise and clear fashion; they need the information to act on what we’re seeing and understand the reasoning behind development decisions.  At oneforty, we go over key metrics results with the entire team for 5-10 minutes each week and have a monitor on the wall in the office that displays 3 core metrics we’re focused on right now.

In addition to communicating within the team, it’s important to also communicate outside.  First, you always want to be tweaking your interview questions based on how your site or product is changing; if you’re considering adding a new feature it is important to understand if it solves a significant problem or is particularly compelling for users before you devote significant engineering time.  The best way to do this is through full interviews, but with tools like KissInsights and SurveyMonkey available, you have easy ways to ask large groups of people questions as well.

The other form of outward communication that’s important is with others doing customer development.  Often, it is hard to tell what is a good number for a metric and if you don’t know, you may be trying to improve something that’s already well optimized.

Recently, I discovered two key figures from asking others:

  • A 10% response rate on email requests to do a customer development interview is actually good.
  • For email newsletters, a 30% open rate and a 20-30% click through are solid and standard across most industries.

To learn these numbers I didn’t do anything special; I simply talked to one of Laura’s mentors, Tweeted a question, tried AskDart and asked some friends.  It didn’t take very long, but saved me a lot of time in the long run.

4) Pattern recognition is your most important skill

In the end, I think customer development is all about recognizing patterns.  You don’t memorize everything a user says in an interview; you’re merely looking for commonalities across many interviews. You should be asking yourself, “Are similar users mentioning the same frustrations or questions?”   These patterns are how you identify your “earlyvangelists” and identify the most important issues to work on.

You can also look at metrics the same way.  The goal is not to have to measure every single activity on your site. Rather, you should be searching for a few specific activities that can lead to the needle moving on many things on your site.

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Customer development is an essential part of an early startup’s life as they search for product market fit. It’s a challenging job, but fortunately there are tons of great resources out there and an open community sharing their knowledge.  If you’re looking to learn more, search for content from Steve Blank and Eric Ries, look for the hashtag #LeanStartups on Twitter and look for Meetups around you on this topic.

What have you learned by doing your startup’s customer development?

5 Lessons Learned in a Lean Startup

18 January 2012

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Note: This post originally appeared on GreenhornConnect.com on February 23, 2011. I’m organizing all my customer development posts from GHC on here for easy reference (see the Lean Startups tab).

In honor of both the Lean Startup Circle Meetup on Thursday and the Lean Startup Machine coming this weekend, I’d like to share a few lessons I’ve learned in the past year as I’ve served as Customer Development Manager at oneforty and been actively learning the Lean Startups methodology.

5 Lessons Learned in a Lean Startup

1) Don’t ask what people would pay for. They lie.

Yes that’s right. Even Honest Abe wouldn’t have told you what he’d really pay for if you showed him a web app and asked what he’d pay for on top of what you showed.

Customers are terrible at explaining their problems and understanding the root issue. As the saying goes, the one certainty for a patient seeing a psychiatrist is that what the patient says is cause of their problems is never the actual problem.

Even I have lied. I was talking with Chris Keller about his awesome tool Followup.cc, which is an email reminder system, and I said, “I would pay to be able export all of my reminders to my Google calendar.”  Chris wisely also looked at engagement and based much of his pricing system on number of reminders, but he also put the calendar export in his paid version.  I am now a paying customer of Followup.cc but have yet to actually use the Google calendar system.

Did I intend to lie? Of course not. But it just goes to show the mindset you can get in and how far from the truth it can be. Don’t ask people what they’d pay for.

2) Nothing beats getting a customer to actually pay for something.

There is no better validation for your business than getting a user to actually pay for something.  Despite the true value of your time, few people actually account for this. That means they are actually quite likely to be willing to use your free product, while having no intention of ever paying for it.

Paying also moves you beyond the realm of being a favor; friends, acquaintances or just nice guys, no one will pay for your product unless it really solves a pain or strongly interests them.

As an added bonus, once someone pays for something, they have expectations. That means that their feedback will be stronger, because they gave you their money and now expect that you will deliver on what they hoped they were buying. This feedback is priceless, as building something that satisfies them can be built into the repeatable process that goes into a sales funnel.

3) You have to learn the customer’s language.

You may call your product anything you want but if it and the language you use to describe it doesn’t resonate with your customer, you’re unlikely to move forward.  You need to understand your customer’s language and make your product speak that language.

The best way to do this is to look at what words your customer uses to search for the problem you’re solving and, of course, the customer development interview. Remember, your customers should be doing 70-80% of the talking in your interviews.

4) A customer’s stating a problem is more valuable than a customer agreeing with a problem you present.

One of the key tenants of Lean Startups is that you’re solving a customer’s pain.  Often the question is if what you are building is a so called “Vitamin,” which is nice to have, or you’ve created a “Pain Pill,” which they definitely need.

One indicator of which side of the Vitamin/Pain Pill coin your product is on is how the problem that your product solves is surfaced. If in the middle of your interview (before you pitch your solution) the customer talks specifically about the problem you’re trying to solve, you have a much stronger indicator of pain than if you ask them if they are experiencing pain in the area you believe is a problem.

Now, this does not mean that someone who doesn’t come right out and say your problem isn’t a potentially valuable customer. However, when you’re looking for those early adopters (aka- earlyvangelists) you should be thinking about who most desperately needs your solution and that is likely people who have the problem you’re trying to solve on top of mind.

5) Be precise in your Hypotheses.

So you think you have a product solution that is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Great. But who is it for and how does it solve a key pain for them?

One of the risks in creating your lean startup is that you forget to get specific on your hypothesis. Don’t say “this is for doctors”; say “this is for pediatricians in suburban environments that have small, private practices.”

The reason you need to be specific is to avoid false indicators. If you don’t make your hypothesis specific, than you are very likely to talk to a wide range of people. When talking to this wide range, you may not find the interest you would otherwise if you specifically went after a specific group.  You could end up talking to a bunch of chiropractors and surgeons and never realize that the reason there was no interest in your product wasn’t that it’s not a great idea solving a problem; no one was interested because you weren’t talking to the right people.

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There’s a seemingly endless amount to learn about Lean Startups, so no matter what stage you’re at just remember: Stick with it, Be patient and Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

There’s a great community on Twitter (look for hashtags #LeanStartups and #CustDev), many awesome blogs (Eric Ries, Ash Maruya, Dan Martell, David Cancel and many others) and of course great events (Lean Startups Circle) to help.

How to Structure (and get the most out of) Customer Development Interviews

18 January 2012

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Running a startup puts a ton of responsibilities on your plate. From marketing to sales, ghetto-HR to accounting, development to project management, you’re wearing a million hats.  We all know that Lean Startups methodology and customer development are important, but *actually practicing* it can be hard (if you’re not familiar run to CustDev.com *right now* and get Brant and Patrick‘s book The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ASAP!).

As you commit yourself to “getting outside the building” to talk to your customers and truly quest for Product-Market Fit, it’s essential you make the most of those discussions. One of the hardest things for newcomers to customer development is structuring their questions for customer development, so I’d like share how I structure interviews to maximize their effectiveness.

How to Structure (and get the most out of) Customer Development Interviews

A few others have written about how they do interviews, so definitely check out Cindy Alvarez and Sachin Aggarwal’s thoughts on the subject. 

I structure my custdev interviews in 3 parts – People, Problems, and Your Solution. Depending on the person, this question flow generally takes me 30-45 minutes to go through. (Note: This structure is best suited to B2B customer development, but with a little creativity, you can definitely adapt this for B2C interviews)

1) People – Aka – Who Are You?

Before you get into anything about problems or your solution, you need to figure out who you’re actually talking to. This both warms up your interviewee with some softball questions and gives you an opportunity to build some rapport with them.

Some example questions you could ask:

  • What is your name and role at your company?
  • How do you fit into your company’s department structure? Overall in the company?
  • What is your budget like? Who has to approve your purchases?
  • How do you discover new products for work? Do you need any approval to try them?
  • Have you tried anything new recently?
  • What is a typical day like on your job?
  • How much time do you spend doing [task X]? (Task X being anything they mentioned in their typical day that stood out)

Do not shortchange this opening section of questions! You don’t need a novel on their daily life, but you *do need* enough to be able to understand their role within their company, who key players are and a general baseline of their sophistication. All of this will help you later pattern match who the user type that is most receptive to the problem you’re solving and the solution you offer.

2) Problems – Aka – What are your greatest pains?

This section is where you try to find out whether the person has the problem you believe you’re solving.  Your goal is to not lead them to your problem. The less you lead them while still hearing your problem being mentioned the more validation you have!

Some sample questions you could ask:

  • What are your top 3 challenges you face in your job?
  • What are your top 3 challenges you face in your job related to [industry X]? (Industry X being the one your startup is in)
  • If you could wave a magic wand and instantly have a solution to any of those problems…what would the solution be?
  • Dig deeper into their typical day on anything that sounds painful or expensive. (You can add some hyperbole here to get them to rant a bit by saying things like “that sounds inefficient…” or “that sounds expensive…”)
  • How have you dealt with or solved [Problem X]? (You’re looking to find out if they’ve hacked a solution together themselves. If they have…ask for a copy of it!)

People love to talk about themselves, so let them go nuts here and really rant about their problems (i.e.- Shut up and listen!).  Generally, people are terrible at proposing solutions, but you want to hear generally what they envision as solutions or see what they’ve cobbled together themselves.

Notice, you haven’t mentioned your solution or problem yet. If they don’t mention your problem specifically, then as you finish this section of questioning, you should directly ask them if what you think is a problem is a problem for them. Whether they agree it’s a problem or not, you want to then probe why it wasn’t one of their top problems.

3) Your Solution – Aka – See if your idea survives customer interaction

If in your discussions in part 2 your problem you think you’re solving comes up naturally from your interviewee you’re on the right track! Bonus points if the way they describe solving it with their “magic wand” remotely resembles what you’re doing.

No matter what happens in part 2 you should discuss with them what you thought the problem was and what your solution is. Getting validation that they wouldn’t be interested in the idea is just as helpful as finding out they love it; either they’re not a customer or you are learning what your customers want instead of it.

Some sample questions you could ask:

  • Walk them through the problems you believe your solution solves. Do they agree?
  • Does [your solution] solve any of their problems?
  • Would you be willing to pay for our solution? How much? (Don’t be afraid to probe for the pricing you know you want…”Would [X] be reasonable?”)
  • If they’re willing to pay your price and like the idea then…”Would you be willing to start right away?”

If all goes well and you really are solving a pain, then your customer should want access to the product right away. More likely, you’re going to learn a ton about what they do and do not want and your idea will begin evolving.

This basic structure can carry you a long way towards some great validated learning about your idea and the market’s desire for it.

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A few last things to remember:

1) Take Good Notes or Record Everything!

- Once you’ve interviewed 8-10 people, you should be going back over all of your notes and look for patterns. This includes especially looking for patterns in the Part 1 section to see what all the people that agree you are solving their problem have in common. You should summarize your notes then and share with your team.

2) Have other team members sit in on some interviews

- A good customer development focused company will have everyone involved in the process. Performable, pre-HubSpot acquisition, had their engineers spending 30% of their time on the phone with customers. Nothing helps someone do their job better like understanding who they’re building/selling/marketing for.

3) Be conversational

- It shouldn’t feel like an interview! They should feel like they’re just having a conversation with a friend about their problems at work. The more comfortable they feel with you, the more they will open up.

4) Go off script

- The best stuff comes when you dig a little deeper on something that strikes a chord in the discussion.  The script is there to be your roadmap, but there’s no reason you can’t return to it after a 5 minute digression about a specific pain or discovery about how the company operates.

5) If they’ve made an MVP…ask to see it!

- Nothing gives you more insight to a customer than what they’ve hacked together themselves to solve a problem. The best thing you can do is ask to see it, which will give you an idea of what they’re hoping a solution will provide. These people are also the strongest candidates to be great, helpful early adopters of your product.

6) Always follow up

- It’s just common courtesy to thank people for their time and help, but it also opens the door to follow up with them in the future if your product changes and is a fit for them or to invite them to your beta.

7) End with an ask

- Always end your interviews by thanking them and asking them for something. It may be to get a copy of their MVP or even better, ask for an intro to someone they know that might be interested in what you’re working on. In my experience, these intros have an 80-90% success rate in becoming new customer development interviews, whereas cold emails only have a 10% success rate.

8) Be open to new problems! That’s how great products are born.

- As Steve Blank has said, “No idea survives first interaction with a customer.” Don’t be afraid to shift your focus from your first idea to what you’re actually hearing customers want.  If you probe in part 2 and find a burning problem…find out how they currently solve it and what they’d pay to solve it.

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In the end, you want to find a “hair on fire” problem, not a “nice to have problem.”  Think about it this way: If my hair is on fire (literally), and you’re selling buckets of water, I’m definitely going to buy your product. But if I’m cold and wet, I’m not likely to buy your bucket of water right now, but would consider it in the future.

Find customer pain and a solution they desire and will pay for. Rinse. Repeat.

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs doing customer development interviews?

Don’t build that feature! How to use the 5 Why’s to learn what your customer really is saying

6 January 2012

1 Comment

This post originally appeared on Greenhorn Connect here; I’m housing posts on my blog here as well for easy reference.

Whether you interview customers regularly, watch support requests on HelpScout or use a GetSatisfaction or UserVoice – like tool, your startup is inundated with feature requests from your customers.  It’s great to have them engaging, but can lead to the dreaded “feature creep” that leads to a bloated, unusable product. What’s a startup to do? The answer may surprise you in its simplicity: use the 5 Why’s.

Don’t build that feature! How to use the 5 Why’s to learn what your customer really is saying

In case you’re not familiar, the concept of 5 Why’s is that by asking a person a series of “why” questions, you can get to the real root cause of an issue. Commonly, the issue can be used to do analysis of technical failures as outlined in a great post by Eric Ries found here. However, this can be just as powerful when you apply it to discussions with customers about features.  The power comes from saving you from building things customers actually don’t want or need and surfacing what is really important.

This concept really crystallized for me when I had an experience talking to Chris Keller, the founder of email reminder tool, Followup.cc. I was an active user, but Chris hadn’t decided how to monetize yet. I told him I’d pay for Followup if he provided a calendar to see all my Followup reminders.

There’s just one problem – despite the fact that Chris built that feature not long after our discussion, I’ve never used the calendar even though I am a paying customer because of the core product.

Chris could have avoided building the feature if he had used the 5 Why’s. Here’s how it may have gone.

Me: I’d pay for Followup if you provided a calendar to see all my Followup reminders.

WHY #1: Chris: Why would that make you pay for it?

Me: Because I could then see all the Reminders I’ve set up.

WHY #2: Chris: Why do you want to see all the reminders you’ve set up?

Me: So that I know when I have reminders coming up.

WHY #3: Chris: Why do you want to know when you have reminders coming up?

Me: So I’m sure I know when I should expect a bunch of reminders.

WHY #4: Chris: Why do you need to know when you should expect reminders?

Me: (long pause) …So I’m sure I get all my reminders.

WHY #5: Chris: Why wouldn’t you get all your reminders?

Me: Good question. I guess I’m worried about it not always working.

Chris: Don’t worry. I’ve built Followup to be robust and reliable. Are you sure you need that calendar?

Me: Maybe not.

Your results may vary, but the point is, customers are terrible at coming up with solutions. What they are good at is sharing their problems, which you can solve. The key is to interact with them in a methodical way to get to the heart of what they really need.  Next time you hear from a customer that you need to build a new feature…ask them the 5 Why’s first!