I continue to reflect on Steven Gary Blanks’ Four Steps to the Epiphany and have even gone so far as to give a copy to everyone on my team. 

I think it methodically and directly frames the essence of the challenges of building and launching technology products.  I also believe that most of the lessons can be extended beyond to tech to just about any go-to-market effort.  I marked a few pages as I read it the first time and wanted to share some of the things I thought were compelling. 

One of the recurring themes Blank lays out deals with how you are trying to enter a market and how your tasks and challenges vary based on the path you choose:

1. New product to an existing market
2. New product to new market
3. New product to existing market and trying to re-segment as low cost entrant
4. New product to existing market and trying to re-segment that market as a niche entrant

Also, core to the message is the notion of a “learning and discovery process.”  This is the sometimes uncomfortable and frustrating process of testing your hypothesis on the market and refining based on what you learn.  A customer engagement process vs. building something and tossing it into the market assuming it will be adopted….what a concept.

“Learning and discovering who a company’s initial customers will be, and what markets they are in, requires a separate and distinct process from Product Development”

I became aware of this book via Marc Andreessen’s post on it and it ties together nicely with his thoughts (and mine) on achieving product/market fit, the steps to get there, and knowing what it feels like once the market begins to “pull” your product or service.

Thanks to the folks at South Park for making clips available (via Brad Feld).  The attached clip is the underpants business and the "brilliant" plan to make a profit from it.  In classic South Park humor, it points out the absurdity of not thinking through the details of a business.

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:southparkstudios.com:151040:

We all get to decide how much like Larry Ellison we want to be but you cannot deny the success and related success of companies and people he has/had a hand in from Oracle to Netsuite to Saleforce to Tom Siebel.

A post on FoundRead sums up two of Larry’s rules the first relating to start-ups and the second related to work focus:

1.  Eat what you kill.  Or at least act like you killed it.

This is the other people’s money (OPM) trap and this hits at the core of treating the money you raise from others like it’s yours and that it may be all you get.

2.  Are you building it or selling it?

I like this one.  You do one of two things in a company – help build it or help sell it.  If you do something else, you won’t do it for long.

“Marketers are sales people. If they think of themselves as anything else, they’re not doing their job.”

This comes from John Cook’s Venture Blog.  I’m still not sure this is a comparison worth making but think the points made in an interview with Tony Wright of RescueTime are interesting especially the differences in density of early stage capital and connections for distribution/business development opportunities.

Pluck is an Austin, TX company led by Dave Panos that provides social media for publishers and one of the companies I link to over on the right side of this blog.  According to TechCrunch, looks like $75MM cash on $10MM in revenue and $10MM in venture capital.  I met Dave through a good friend many years ago and we have touched base off and on since.  Congrats to Dave and the Pluck team.

This certainly applies to how I manage (reference my "spot it, got it" post) but is also one of the more interesting notes made in a small notebook during the launch of Idapta in late ’99 by one of our early investors.  This was recently re-discovered along with the PRD cover sheet I just posted on and is an interesting trip down memory lane.  I’m not real sure how I ended up with it or managed to keep it over the past ~9 years but there are some valuable (and blunt) points in these few short notes.  We were still a very new company (~6 mos old) and our messaging and value proposition were not strong.  We wanted to tell people "how" and not "why" and had prospects telling us our value (the last note on the page calls this out).

Marel found a box of stuff that included a few items from the wayback machine including the cover sheet to the first product requirements document I ever prepared in my first gig as a product manager.  If you follow this blog and worked at IntelligentDigital/Idapta, your signature may be on this PRD cover sheet dated 9/21/99.  The goal was to get the entire exec team to buy into what we were building and in what time frame by signing the cover document.

This was my first start-up experience and I learned some harsh but valuable lessons.  It was during the last boom/bubble so sound business principles were not at the forefront of decision making.  The company re-branded as "Idapta" after a very expensive and useless branding project – at least the number syllables in the name was reduced.

The experience was formative and I am blessed to have met my wife there as well as made many great friends.  I believe that everyone needs one of these experiences to truly "get" what it takes to start, grow, and run a new venture.  For those really interested in nostalgia, here’s the last version of the website (hosted by talented designer and alum Jamie Martin) after we repositoined to attack the enteprise market.

Oh well…there’s always next year.  This is an interesting list put together by Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa over on the Seattle 2.0 blog.  A few I already subscribe to plus a few new ones.

Ok, so this video is old news by now but as someone who experienced one bubble in the past (anyone remember 98-01?), I find this a bit entertaining. 

Building a company is hard.  Getting venture funds may oscillate between impossible and ridiculously easy depending on the availability of said funds, but building a company is always hard.

The margins may be populated with soon to be killed off stupid company ideas funded by newly fashioned VCs but I love the innovation and optimism of all of this.  I also love the Bay Area and its regional siblings but if you spend some time there or live there, get on a plane soon.  Go to somewhere like St. Louis or Houston.  Tell someone there about your "idea."   See what kind of reaction you get.

A good friend told me a long time ago (thanks Greg Nicholson) something that sticks with me to this day.  If you think you’ve got a business idea, what is it about it that would make someone take a dollar out of their pocket and give it to you for it.  Not an investor…but a real customer…and ad revenue doesn’t (really) count.

Looks like you better be on your toes if you are going to follow in Bill Gates’ footsteps.  From his recent remarks via the Seattle Times about those with aspirations of building a similar sized company today:

"…you’d better see something I don’t see if you want to start a company now."

Or…at least be nimble enough to get out ahead of him.  Microsoft, like Google, has a pile a cash and truck loads of bright people that can attack a market if it suits them.   The key is to complement, enhance, and/or extend product and platform strategies of companies like this.   

Or…if you are clever enough…see something they don’t.