Business

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and requesting customer interviews. Lean Startup literature make it sound as if customer development is hard work, but manageable. Well, even that is an understatement: even requesting customer interviews is hard! I spent the past month contacting 40 people by phone, email and LinkedIn. Here are the biggest issues I ran into and the biggest lessons I learned while doing customer development in the Netherlands, in a B2B context.

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and requesting customer interviews. But what do you do once you're in an interview? In this article I will discuss what to do and what to ask in order to get the most insights out of an interview session, as well as what sorts of things you should probe for.

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and requesting customer interviews. But I was told my messages are too American. The ways Americans talk is too outgoing, flamboyant and over-the-top by Dutch and perhaps also German standards. It's probably also a bit too long. Seeing that my initial customer base will be based in the Netherlands, I will need to tone down and shorten my messages. Here's what I did.

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and its customer discovery phase. In this blog post I will go deeper into the step about talking to customers. When searching within one's network for customers to interview, how do you ask your network for introductions?

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology. In this blog post I will go deeper into its first phase, which is "customer discovery".

If you hang out in startup circles like I do, then you may have heard of the “Learn Startup” methodology. But what is it exactly? I’ve been researching Lean Startup and in this blog post I will summarize what I’ve learned, explain what new insights this research has given me, and talk about future research and blogging directions.

It has often been stated by business consultants and startup advisors that a company should have a purpose beyond vision. Studies show that that result in more motivated and loyal customers and employees. As Simon Sinek said: people don’t buy or follow what you do, but why you do it.

I agree. That was the easy part. But how do you actually define a good purpose? People need to feel that your purpose is aligned with their own values, and a purpose statement needs to balance many different things for many different people.

This post documents the start of my journey in an attempt to find answers.

Red Hat and New Relic are some of the most interesting companies out there. We all know how big Red Hat is. New Relic is an application monitoring tool company that sped past all its competitors in its early days and achieved IPO. In 2015 the company had a monthly revenue of $29 million, with a year-on-year revenue growth of 69%. What do these tech giants have in common? Their marketing strategy.