You really have no idea
I attended Steve Blank’s talk last week and it really hit home for me, so I thought I’d share it with all of you.
When you launch your product, you really have no idea if it’s going to work, so don’t pretend like you do. Instead, first product launch is your opportunity to validate your vision by finding early adopters who are willing to use your buggy product that is lacking features and work closely with them to develop a mainstream product. Ideally, you’ve been doing that from the beginning (before you have working code, even) but definitely before you try to target the mainstream market.
Therefore, until you’ve gotten early adopters to pay for your product (or in some other way invest resources), you have no idea if what you’ve built is ready to be sold and marketed. So until you do, do not:
- Hire sales people
- Hire a PR firm
- Hire marketing people
- Buy expensive advertising
- Land interviews with major publications and news outlets
You are wasting your time, money, and opportunity (the NYTimes is only going to write about you once) on a product that hasn’t been market tested. You don’t know if the value proposition resonates with people enough that they will pay for it. Most likely, it doesn’t, so you’ll be blowing your precious cash trying to get people to buy something they don’t want.
This was a big eye-opening moment for me. I’ll get to the specific lessons-learned with regards to Postling in a later post.
reblogged from caterpillarcowboy
OC Little Planet by Ronnie Bruce / Full Frame Photoblogthis is probably the coolest stereoscopic picture i’ve seen… stunning…
reminds me of an Olafur Eliason exhibit at The Tate in London several years ago — very cool
reblogged from courtneyj
TechCrunch: TeachStreet Launches Payments Platform For Teachers
oh baby — features and fun at TeachStreet — go win yourself some free classes, thru August 15!
re-introducing our cool new features - payments and call tracker!
in the past couple months, we’ve been working like crazy to bust out some amazing features to help our teachers and community learn something new. the teachstreet team kicked ass and took names.great stuff and check it out. find a class, pay for it and enjoy learning. for the next 30 days, you’ll also have a chance to win a free class - so don’t miss out!
website: http://teachstreet.com
We rolled out the latest version of the site tonight, including payment services for teachers, phone tracking, and lots of underlying changes to support those and other features moving forward.
The TeachStreet blog has more details, but I’ll just say that I’m pretty excited about what we’ve built, and looking forward to what’s next (perhaps after a few hours of sleep).
Thanks to the entire TeachStreet team, especially our awesome devs: Scott and Phil, our new designer/unicorn Greg, and Julie, our summer intern who turned my little call tracker project into a real full blown feature.
reblogged from josephsunga
Granted, it’s certainly hard to top yesterday’s blowout horrifying gem, but we persevere with this track - a lovely countryfied ditty about a homicide.
Sure, it’s taboo, but why not, right? I mean, this lady cheated - she clearly deserves to be murdered - with background singers. Uggggh. Again, who thought this was a good idea?
The lyrical gem, “bury you in a box half your size” absolutely slays our faith in humanity - as if we had any left after listening to these demos day after day. Vomit, coming up.
reblogged from wowdemoblog
Source: Ramirez's substance a sexual enhancer
A source close to Manny Ramirez(notes) said Thursday that the illegal substance for which the Los Angeles Dodgers slugger tested positive was not “an agent customarily used for performance enhancing.”
At least not on the baseball diamond. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the substance is supposed to boost sex drive. It is not Viagra, but a substance that treats the cause rather providing a temporary boost in sexual performance, the source said.
Yahoo! Sports
reblogged from caterpillarcowboy
Is Tumblr the coolest?
I’m falling more in love with Tumblr every day — it’s taken me awhile to figure out the reader-ness of it, with the easyness-to-use-ness of it. Just love it.
I love my niece
Sitting with Bill Wixey at Q13
I love the Internet
Yes! Why did they not build this? I think it would have sold well.
ak47:
kml:
blog.betabong.com - VW Microbus Concept. Why not?
reblogged from matsm
