cyberlaxamana

by Lauren Miller The lean start-up approach has the advantage of using genuine customer feedback as a means of improving the entrepreneur’s product specifically for those perceived as the niche consumer, but numerous stories from entrepreneurs and case protagonists about acting on false positives and negatives has caused me to wonder: can smoke and other lean start-up tests just end up being smoke in the entrepreneur’s face? ” I question whether an entrepreneur should take the results of his or her tests as “gospel” since pitfalls in the experiment design and interpretation of results can be numerous. I will focus on a few of these potential pitfalls. Focus groups Steven Carpenter shared in the Cake Financial case that he has “learned that focus groups… can be unreliable because people can’t always say what they want until they can actually see it and play around with it.” This highlights the fact that customers often can’t or won’t tell you what they want or need and are often li...

by Matthew Thurmond Don’t spend months learning to code or looking for a technical co-founder. My interviews with Harvard Business School entrepreneurs and outsourcing industry experts reveal a new playbook for early-stage ventures that replaces the “shut the door and learn to code” ethos with an “outsource early and hire late” strategy. A handful of web-based tools and services are enabling this shift and savvy entrepreneurs are using them to quickly and cheaply bring minimum viable products (MVP) to market. The 5 steps below describe an easier way to create MVPs: 1) Mock it up First things first. What, specifically, do you want to build? If it’s a website, skim similar sites and draw up the main pages with your desired logo. After a few iterations on paper, you should have a general outline. Now use Balsamiq to do a more formal mock-up. The end result will be a shareable pdf that looks like a pencil sketch. 2) Design the graphics & specs Now you want to add color and interactivi...

by Stirling Cox The idea of a product that would enable commuters in a given city to access information on the location of their buses, has been occupying my thoughts since the summer of last year. With a background in Banking and Consulting, what had been bashed into my head through various training programs and countless deals and projects is that you need to be 100% sure of your facts before opening your mouth. As such I was convinced that it was only through significant primary research and presentation that I would ever be able to prove the viability of my idea and start a business. I spent much time during the end of the summer and fall term of EC year researching number of commuters, their habits, Smartphone proliferation, looking at different markets that product could be applied to, producing possible revenue models in Excel, preparing financial statements and fancy PowerPoint slides explaining the business. Years of “bad” entrepreneurial practice had me convinced that I neede...

by Evan Shore (republished from his personal blog ) Towards the end of our conversation, Jeff Immelt patted me on the back and said, “Interesting.” After I probed further, he continued, “It’s a good idea, and I think I can see the benefit. I just need to think more about it.” I wondered, as I did during the past several conversations with potential customers, how I could advance from hearing “interest ing ” to “interest ed .” CONTEXT: CUSTOMER DISCOVERY INTERVIEWS Several months ago, I set out on a quest to understand the specific pain-points that corporations face when it comes to Innovation. I interviewed the CEOs and C-Suite executives of over 40 companies. Most executives identified the same problem:  “The single greatest challenge for us is identifying and executing innovations outside the boundaries of our business models.” I had a vision for a new type of open innovation intermediary that stemmed from my exposure to  IDEO ,  Innocentive ,  Gen3 Partners , con...

by Chris Tam & Kathy Wang Our blog was by far our most effective tool of inbound marketing and during the initial phase of growth was the top landing page for our site, versus the actual website itself. What was great about blogging as an inbound marketing tool: Blog posts are easily shared. All we needed was a few “influencers” on the web to find our content interesting, pass it along, and we got huge spikes in traffic. Though our traffic figures eventually stabilized after these “spikes,” each time our content was shared, some of the new readers to our site stayed, explored, and checked out our main landing page. You can also use blogs to help “exchange” traffic. It was difficult for us to convince a successful blogger or content producer to plug heroiQ or include a link to us on their site - after all, our main landing page isn’t going to be a muddled list of a bunch of links. But a blog is perfect for that - we would link our blog posts to other blogs we liked, and some of the...

by Douglas Melchior What kind of content will drive clicks and convert visitors into users or customers?  I posed this question to marketing directors at five different consumer Internet companies, including Brett Below at Rent the Runway, Andrew Sinkov of Evernote, Liz Wald of Etsy, and Shawna Strayhorn of Refinery29.  I overlaid these practical findings with research from Brian Halligan at Hubspot. Content can be anywhere on the website, and is viewed by search engines and humans alike.  Content on the homepage gets the most views, but it has to be useful to people and peak interest immediately.  Here are 5 strategic tips to maximize the value of content on your site and outbound communication: 1) Write Content for All Sides of the Platform .  At Etsy , the marketplace for handmade goods, the marketing team creates content for both buyers and sellers.  Use these two types of content to engage a small but active buyer community, and to attract ...

by Aunim Hossain Baller.  You’ve spent months running around, talking to everyone you know (or don’t know), attending conferences, scouring the online job resources…all with the goal of building your dream team that will take this from a great idea to a company that will change the world.  And you rocked it.  You have the team you need: one product manager (you), three developers with front-end and back-end skills, and one artist/UI guru.  You feel like you’ve arrived.  You say to yourself, “now, it’s all about getting it done, but that should be pretty simple with the team of ninjas I assembled, right?”  But this is where many promising founders stumble.  Even with the right team in place, success is not guaranteed.  While there are many variables that determine success, one of the most important variables that founders can control (and often don’t) is building the right culture.  Culture is created through the processes that founders...

by Rosemary Kendrick & Aleem Mawani It’s been, well, a very rewarding semester working on Rewardly.  As we reflect on the main tools we employed this semester—merchant interviews, business model generation, generating mockups, and developing a prototype—we have a few takeaways we’d like to share. First off, when it comes to interviewing local businesses , be prepared to throw enough darts .  Local business managers are tough to pin down with understandably ever-shifting schedules, so we found ourselves juggling a bunch of cancellations and rescheduling.  It’s helpful to remember that the customer discovery process is a sales process: you start with a lot of cold leads, eventually secure enough interviews, and then ultimately score a few letters of intent.  A corollary to the throw-enough-darts mantra is the realization that you don’t know what you don’t know.   It’s hard to predict which local businesses will be the most helpful to talk to, and it’s e...

by Mohammed Aaser This semester I worked on developing and launching Noor Kids , which is a magazine for Muslim Children.  The goal is to build a brand around our characters and launch additional business lines in the future.  In order to assess the demand for the product, I created Facebook ads.  Based on the performance of these ads, I decided to launch the business, and created an 11-page sample version for prospective customers.  In addition, I am currently working on driving sales through landing page optimization.  While I learned a tremendous amount through this experience, I would like two share two key insights – 1) How to assess a business concept through Facebook Ads, and 2) How to optimize landing pages. 1) How to assess a business concept through Facebook Ads Facebook can be a great way to test a business concept before launching.  You can place an ad on Facebook targeting a very specific group of people, and can see what proportion s...