Comments for Market By Numbers

Comment on The Order of AARRR by ‘AARRR Me Hearties!’ Agile Treasure – itkanban

‘AARRR Me Hearties!’ Agile Treasure – itkanban — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:02:01 +0000

[...] http://market-by-numbers.com/2011/02/aarrr-is-from-the-pirates-point-of-view/ [...]

Comment on Cognitive Biases, Positive Black Swan Events and Startups by actual black swan

actual black swan — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 04:14:52 +0000

This is a well written article and there is a lot of truth to it.

HOWEVER.

The irony here is… that people, INCLUDING investors/angels/incubators are such sheep that they will very easily have a black swan Blatantly right in front of them… and will ignore it in their search for the perfect ABC silicon valley model of success. The ideal ‘team’, the ideal ‘pitch’ the ideal idea.

How do people come up with the ideal pitch?? Well they plan What People Want to Hear you fucking idiots. You know this.

Yet you sheep want to be ‘dazzled’, you want to be given what you want and expect to hear. Because that is makes feel validated and comfortable. So while looking for those golden swans in the lake amongst the predictable white… the black swan sits there completely alone and stunned at everyone else’s sheepish and predicatable behavior.

Comment on Why UX? Why now? by John Halloran

John Halloran — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:22:37 +0000

This is a great conversation, and you’ve articulated some great points about why and how UX is currently having such an impact on the industry. I think it’s also important to keep in mind that UX is powerful in part because, when done well, it draws on a long and rich history of design thinking that certainly predates that computer industry.

Design thinking emphasizes deep research and understanding of users and industries, as well as incorporating experimentation and iteration (a la Thomas Edison http://hbr.org/2008/06/design-thinking/ar/1) into the learning process. The proliferation of the Internet, along with agile, rapid deployment philosophy (and plenty of other efficiencies we’ve all benefitted from over the past 10 years or so) have made this kind of deep research and experimentation much more accessible to those building and running businesses, both digital and otherwise. This situation puts smart UX practitioners in a position to have more powerful, and obvious impacts on a business, and to do so quickly. And of course, it brings plenty of benefit to all of us as users.

But it is both useful and important to understand that many of the ideas behind good UX are not so new, and are not inherently about the internet, or technology. There is a rich legacy of design thinking that we can all learn from that goes way beyond the PC era. We’re seeing plenty of benefit from applying that legacy to the industry, but there’s much more to come.

Comment on Why UX? Why now? by Giff

Giff — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 12:23:50 +0000

The whole industry has been growing up, but so has what falls under my definition of UX. it isn’t just about how something works and what it looks like, but what something does and why. It is a holistic role. “Lean UX”, love or hate the term, is an attempt to kick design out of the tactical rut it had been falling into in organizations and make it more strategic and practical at the same time.

But I agree with you. The bar in general for design and what constituters a professional product has been raised.

Comment on Why UX? Why now? by Gail Swanson

Gail Swanson — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:22:31 +0000

What an interesting perspective to look at the progress of the UX field. From down in the trenches it is sometimes difficult to remember how new this world is and expect accelerated rates of change. It is important to remember back to that amazing decade of the 90′s when the world started to engage with computers in a radically different way. The expectations began to change. Instead of assuming that software required training and dedication to learn, people gravitated toward easy to use interfaces. Computers could be for everyone if we designed them that way.

Comment on Why UX? Why now? by Tristan Kromer

Tristan Kromer — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:46:01 +0000

Amen brother. Going through the LUXr.co program was eye opening to me.

Comment on You Can’t “Feature” Your Way to Success by Christian Gray

Christian Gray — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:02:01 +0000

Brant,

Good post, I’m a big fan of the 4 Steps and have found it on many founder’s bookshelves, but not completed… Customer Development is a great shorthand and has driven some very useful conversations. I will share your post with some folks in danger of feature bloat!

Comment on Crossing the Lean Startup Chasm by William

William — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 22:25:50 +0000

I have worked with some startups that decided to spend years (yes, not an exaggeration) building up an amazingly feature filled and scalable platform but neglecting the marketing, documentation, initial user experience, and other factors that contribute to success. A versatile team should be able to fill in the gaps of knowledge and point out how vital these things are. I’ve learned some valuable lessons seeing some of these mistakes being made firsthand and now realize that the MVP movement (minimum viable product) is what 99% of companies should be doing. That way you can spend weeks or just a few months building an initial product and seeing if there’s a market for it. I think this idea being spread has led to a rise in focus on SEO and social media and other things that engineers have some disdain for. Even pretty technically minded startups are using the types of companies listed at http://www.buyfacebookfansreviews.com to get some initial traction and an initial user base right out of the gate. It doesn’t make sense to spend all of this time on a big honking product because odds are any product you build will have to change based on user feedback down the road anyway so there’s no point to building crazy systems. I think there are so many opportunities out there that you shouldn’t spend too much time on any one company. Build something, market the hell out of it: it either shows some signs of life or it doesn’t. This way you maximize your chance of finding a hit. If you already have money and funding: the right strategy might be different but most startups don’t have the ability to get this right away. If you build smaller and cheaper systems you can be profitable and have a chance to grow much quicker.

Comment on The #CustDev Whiteboard by SKMurphy » Business Model Representations

SKMurphy » Business Model Representations — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:23:54 +0000

[...] Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits “CustDev Whiteboard Model“ [...]

Comment on You Are Here by Walter Karshat

Walter Karshat — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 19:58:46 +0000

Very important points about being too early, though being late is perhaps worse. Current mantra of Mobile Social Location Cloud is rather stale already. Not at all that a whole bunch of innovation isn’t still ahead or that the markets are all carved-up already. But, just how many of hundreds of garage startups are going to succeed, of the ones that are clamoring to do coupons on smartphones, and based on proximity to a store, while pulling data from a site hosted on Amazon EC2?

The graph above is plotting rate of growth of adoption, not it’s total. The article points that email still reaches a larger fraction of overall US population than all the other means of electronic communication (except phone calls perhaps). But if a tiny company is in a segment that has flat or decreasing growth, it’s heavily constrained in it’s opportunities for expansion.