Comments for LeanFounder

Comment on Have One Idea and Many Business Models by There Are 2 Types of Startups in the World, and You Better Know Which You Are « LeanFounder

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:48:47 +0000

[...] Have One Idea and Many Business Models [...]

Comment on Have One Idea and Many Business Models by leanfounder

leanfounder — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:32:43 +0000

I mentioned Alexander Osterwalder, who wrote the business model canvas, a couple of times in the plan. He is great, as is his program. I think the insight I had with this recent post was that you can do a bunch of these canvases for a single idea…just iterating on the business model.

Thanks for the reply Morgan. We had a great meetup last night at http://www.EastsideIncubator.com. I hope you can make it on the 15th.

Comment on Have One Idea and Many Business Models by MorganHoward (@MorganHoward)

MorganHoward (@MorganHoward) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:19:35 +0000

I just watched/listened to this talk on Business model tools yesterday and think it applies to what you’re talking about. Check it out. http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2875

Comment on Site Search by Peter Dixon-Moses

Peter Dixon-Moses — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:03:52 +0000

Hey Matt. Love your lean posts. I do site search work among other things. If you’re using Rails for mapr.co, check out http://acts-as-solr.rubyforge.org/. If you get stumped, drop me a line.

Comment on About by Ballard Tax Services: In Search of Caffeine (and a place to meet) | Ballard Beancounters

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 06:17:26 +0000

[...] at LeanFounder.com has developed a map of places where it is fun to grab a cup of coffee (or a beer, or a lunch) with [...]

Comment on Startup Week 13: Business Model Spreadsheet by Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 03 May 2011 03:57:00 +0000

Shilo – Initially, I had two other rows/scores for the spreadsheet: fun and meaning. What I realized as I started running the numbers is that all of the ideas sounded equally meaningful (and not) and fun (and not). I think that success is fun and failure is not fun (particularly if failure takes a really long time). I think it is harder to do anything meaningful with your business if you cannot afford to keep your businesses’ lights on. Perhaps I am leaning towards a business version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs: if you cannot earn more money than you spend, you cannot satisfy the higher order needs of fun and meaning and whatever else you hope to achieve either. Perhaps I will add some more rows into my spreadsheet at some point, but for now I am going to focus on a single bottom line.

As always, thanks for the comment.

Matt

Comment on Startup Week 13: Business Model Spreadsheet by Shilo

Shilo — Mon, 02 May 2011 18:02:00 +0000

Matt, this is a good concept and an important exercise for any early stage found to work on, IMO. I think there are a few other variables to add to the model though. Is the easiest path to profitability the right path to start out on? What about a path that is easy yet not sustainable through some form of competitive advantage? Also, what about your level of passion for each idea? As a serial entrepreneur, passion plays a much more important role than I ever thought it would. I used to believe, maybe naively, that I was simply passionate about building a business and in fact I’ve spent a lot of time building businesses that were successful and not so successful that I wasn’t as passionate about as I have been in the past and as I am now. So, personally, I’d easily sacrifice 3-6-12 months, whatever, if I was building a business I was passionate about and it offered the best return on my time.

Comment on Startup Week 5: Write a press release before you write any code by Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 16:04:00 +0000

Bryan, Scope creep is the biggest killer for small projects, and it happens because people have not really bought into the core value proposition. If you really love the core, you just want to work on that and make it awesome. If you (or your team) finds a constant desire to add new stuff, it is probably because there is a weak value proposition. The press release can bring this to light. You will still have the shifting scope/scope creep, but it will be in the form of prose instead of code…way faster iteration speed!

Thanks for the comment.

Matt

Comment on Startup Week 5: Write a press release before you write any code by Bryan Pearson

Bryan Pearson — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 18:13:00 +0000

Any time you’re going to start software projects you HAVE to have a vision statement; this gives the development team a vision to follow. Without it, you’re in danger of developers going on a Cowboy dev mission and scope creep. Writing a press release before the product is out is a common practice in the Agile/Scrum methodology. It not only pumps up the development team and provides a high level roadmap, it also sets expectations of all potential customers. If you’re going to use Agile/Scrum, then this press release will need to be a living document and change as the feature set gets changed over time. Undoubtedly, the vision will be different at the time when development is code complete.

Comment on Startup Week 5: Write a press release before you write any code by Ripal Nathuji

Ripal Nathuji — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

I agree with the point on avoiding a solution looking for a problem. I think people sometimes gravitate towards building complex systems with the mindset that if it’s hard and hasn’t been done before, it must have value. Starting early with a press release you almost swap the “if you build it, they will come” mentality for “sell the tickets and then build the stadium”. Of course, validating you have a problem that truly needs a different solution is challenging in and of itself. Looking forward to your post on that next week!