Dave Concannon

Some interesting updates from my Posterous stream.  This week Apple released a restrictive terms and conditions for the App store to prevent developers using third party tools to convert apps written in other languages into Objective C. One opinion is that this is a larger play to kill off Adobe flash, but a larger consensus is that this is to try to lock developers into Apple’s platform – If you’re writing Objective C it’s probably a lot of trouble to develop for other platforms.  David Heinemeier Hansson has a good analysis.

• Design and Marketing are more important to startups than Engineering

Dave McClure makes a great case in Business Week for why Design and Marketing are more important to new startups than raw Engineering talent.

• Do you want to be Rich or King?

Dr Mark Goulston on investing in startup founders. Someone who wants to run a business like the King is only going to satisfy their own ego, not make the investors rich.

• Why MBAs suck at Entrepreneurship

Stu Wall on why the skills learned in an MBA course may be ideal for big companies, but might not work so well for an entrepreneurial venture.

• Why some smart people go nowhere

Rajesh Setty on why some exceptional people do relatively little with their lives. I recommend subscribing to his blog, very interesting stuff.

• Friedisms

Finally, one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. This is the satire level of fake Steve Jobs applied to Jason Fried. Hillarious.

Following up on my previous post on game mechanics, I’ve seen some interesting commentary and implementations.

Dave McClure thinks “checkins” (The main ‘game’ component of foursquare and gowalla) will become a commodity within a year. It would seem to make sense – It’s an original idea, but in terms of defensibility there’s no real barrier to prevent people adding this sort of function to any software.  How useful are ‘checkins’ to more serious software? It remains to be seen.  Steve Blank’s latest post on this sort of competitive analysis driving feature sprawl has an interesting summary of why this may not be such a great strategy. It’s not just the nuts and bolts of what you do, it’s the ecosystem you build around it.

Gaming Unit Testing

Where game mechanics can be really interesting is in turning dull tasks into something more interesting. Here’s an example of using “achievements” in a unit testing framework - rewarding the user for getting their tests to pass (or fail in particularly frustrating ways).

Game Dynamics Presentation at DICE 2010

Finally, here’s a very interesting presentation on Game Dynamics from DICE 2010 (via marketing.fm).

The types of sites I read have slowly migrated away from pure technical sites talking about monkeying around with with code towards sites discussing business, customer development, marketing, and general startup concepts. Here’s a list of my favorite authors, blogs, podcasts, and forums dealing with these topics. Who else should I be listening to? Let me know in the comments.

Update: All the best Lean Startup and Customer Development resources in one place: http://www.leanstartupfeed.com/

Customer Development and Lean Startups

Steve Blank

Steve Blank is a successful startup veteran and MBA lecturer in the Haas School of business at UC Berkeley. He took the lessons he learned in successfully marketing his startups to develop the concept of Customer Development in the must read book “The Four Steps to the Epiphany“. Seriously, if you’re working in a startup – you need to read this book.

http://steveblank.com/

Eric Ries

Eric Ries developed the Lean Startup methodology by combining concepts from the Toyota Production System (Lean Manufacturing), Agile Software Development, the OODA loop, and Steve Blank’s Customer Development model. The combination of these ideas results in a low-cost startup that is critically focused on rapidly producing a product which satisfies customer needs. There are some fantastic concepts in his writing which will inspire (Minimum Viable Product) and possibly scare the crap out of you (Continuous deployment for example).

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/

Dave McClure

Dave McClure is a successful entrepreneur and angel investor. Dave mainly writes about using startup metrics to drive success. His “Startup Metrics for Pirates” presentation describes essential metrics any web application needs to measure to turn first-time users into obsessed fans. His refreshingly informal writing style pulls no punches, and his violent use of text color will make your eyes bleed. (The reason I have pictures next to each of these authors is mainly due to this loud advice. He’s right.).

http://500hats.typepad.com/

Individual Article of Merit:

This epic saga by Recess Mobile tries to map out the entire landscape of Customer Development and Lean Startups. I can only imagine how long it took them to write this one.

Startup Marketing

Sean Ellis

Sean is a seasoned startup marketer having led several companies through to IPO. He writes about Customer Development, PR, and startup marketing.  As a quick taster, check out his Venture Hacks interviews on bringing a product to market – Part One on what to do before Product/Market Fit & Part Two on what to do after Product/Market fit.

http://startup-marketing.com/

Brant Cooper

Brant is another very experienced startup marketer who is developing a series of tools and models based around the Customer Development methodology. He recently conducted a survey into the current Customer Development landscape which can be found here: Customer Development Survey. Most recently he put together a simple model which ties Customer Development, the standard sales funnel, and Dave McClure’s AARRR metrics into one cohesive whole [Available Here]. Highly recommended.

Together with Patrick Vlaskovits (@vlaskovits), he wrote the excellent “Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development“, which I reviewed and would recommend highly.

http://market-by-numbers.com/

Venture Capital and Entrepreneurship

Fred Wilson

Fred is a VC at Union Square Ventures based in New York, which funds companies such as FourSquare, Boxee, and Etsy. His blog covers a wide variety of topics in the area of entrepreneurship and business strategy, and also a little bit of venture capital concepts. He provides a very interesting critical eye on technology industry news.

http://www.avc.com/

Mark Suster

Mark is a successful British entrepreneur who has “gone over to the dark side” to become a VC. He covers the gamut of entrepreneurial topics from raising startup capital, marketing, right down to the definition of  “Entrepreneurial DNA“. His fantastic interview on Mixergy was quite probably the most inspiring thing I listened to last year.

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/

Nivi & Naval (Venture Hacks)

Nivi and Naval have founded successful companies, and invested heavily in startups like twitter. They  cover a full range of startup essentials from securing funding from angel investors, how to choose company advisors, the psychology of a board of directors, and a fantastic selection of case studies on all of the above and more.

http://venturehacks.com/

Business Model Hacking

Alexander Osterwalder

Alexander’s blog centers around the Business Model Canvas methodology which involves analyzing business models, pulling them apart into their constituent parts and then reassembling them in interesting ways. Lego for business if you will. He uses an interesting tool sheet to aid this, which I think meshes perfectly into the lean startup concept of ‘pivoting’.

http://www.businessmodelalchemist.com/

Podcasts, Interviews, and Videos

Andrew Warner – Mixergy

Andrew Warner co-founded an internet business with his brother which went on to generate over thirty million dollars a year in sales. With Mixergy, Andrew has conducted some of the most inspiring and amazing interviews with entrepreneurs you’re likely to find. He conducts frank and probing interviews that dig deep into the mindset of his interviewees – people who have either taken their business to dizzying heights, or failed spectacularly trying.  As well as my personal favourite interview with Mark Suster listed above, you should check out this interview with Ben Huh of “Failblog”, or this amusing interview with Neil Patel of KISSMetrics. This is quite simply an amazing resource.

http://www.mixergy.com

Jason Calacanis – This Week in STartups

Jason co-founded weblogs Inc which grew to be a huge network of niche content sites, and was eventually acquired by AOL for a giant bag of money. TWiST interviews a wide range of guests in the technology sphere, and intermittent shows where listeners can ask Jason for advice. Very entertaining and informative.

http://thisweekinstartups.com/

Bob Walsh -  Startup success podcast

Bob specializes in news and advice aimed at MicroISVs at his blog 47 Hats. As opposed to the more general entrepreneurship podcasts listed above, the Startup Success Podcast digs into the more specialized issues faced by independant software vendors.

http://startuppodcast.wordpress.com/

Forums

Lean Startups Circle

A Google group centered around advice for entrepreneurs running lean startups.

http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle

Business of Software Forum

Joel Spolsky’s forum covering a range of issues faced by developers trying to market software.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz

Hacker News

Everything under the sun relating to technology and entrepreneurship. User driven article voting, hosted by Paul Graham’s startup incubator Y Combinator.

http://news.ycombinator.com/