The Methodologist

7 Proven Templates for Writing Value Propositions That Work

tor — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:19:05 +0000

You already know that getting your value proposition right is critical to your business model. You can have the best features, the most perfectly executed presentation, the most stunning price, but no one will ever know of it if they don’t get past your high-level value proposition. But how do you craft such a pitch? Continuously looking to perfect your value proposition, you would consult lengthy articles only to find that there’s a jungle of advise out there. What you need is applicable templates from entrepreneurs and investors who have successfully given and taken thousands of pitches, right? So I’ve put together 7 proven templates that [...]

10 Scrappy Minimum Viable Products That Made It

tor — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:20:35 +0000

This deck includes the early websites of Facebook (still with the The), 37signals, LinkedIn (not that bad in fact), eBay (without the pictures I’m afraid), Twitter (probably the first sketch), and more. Note that some may miss CSS and therefore may not display identical to the original. If “preach what you teach” still holds, this better be a minimum viable blog post. As far as I put the slide deck together in under 1o minutes, did the research for it during a quick train trip this morning, and publish this as soon as possible (even if it’s a bad time to post), [...]

Symptoms of the Norwegian Startup Ecosystem

tor — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 08:20:48 +0000

This post originally ran on ArcticStartup. As inventors of the object-oriented programming language and the modern GSM technology, you would expect Norway to have the perfect ingredients for a vibrant startup scene. If you, however, search this or any other notable tech blog for news on early-stage Norwegian startups, you would find next to nothing. While Nordic and Baltic startups seems to thrive, why don’t we see any ventures emerging out of Norway, several Nordic and European professionals questioned me. After talking to a handful of entrepreneurs, investors, and scholars about why this is the case, I discovered seven symptoms [...]

Six Rules For Incubating Lean Startups Within The Enterprise

Tor — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:42:13 +0000

Corporations want to build the next Facebook or Groupon as much as you, I, and the guy in the garage. While corporations might have an advantage in resources and capital to do so, they do at the same time meet with hurdles that independent startups don’t. Over the past years I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from corporate new- business analysis, product roll-outs, and early-stage M&A assessments at the one side, and from founding or helping raw startups at the other side. Unfortunately, there is a pattern – the methods often provided by the former are rather diminishing in successfully incubating new ventures. [...]

Startup Summer Kick-off at Opera Software’s: Norway Gets a True Hackathon

tor — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:21:19 +0000

As of yesterday about 20 talented developers will be gathered for the next couple of weeks at Opera Software’s premises in Oslo to build and launch new applications. Startup Summer is one of its kind hackathon in Norway encouraging companies to take on Lean Startup techniques. The contestants are mainly graduate students from The Norwegian School of Science and Technology, Informatics at the University of Oslo, and various university colleges, but also existing entrepreneurs and freelancers. During the period all teams will have access to mentors as well as being able consult Opera personnel. In the end of the event and August 12. the teams [...]

How To Communicate Your Bootstrapped Startup: Are You a Consulting or Product Business?

Tor — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:00:42 +0000

Bootstrapping your startup brings along a trade-off in communications and marketing. You have two messages to communicate: one about your service offering, the other about the product that you are building. How do you prioritize what to communicate? Are you a service or product company? This was and still is a question that we deal with at Lingo Social each day. Recently I had coffee with friend and founder of Mobilskole.no discussing what seemed to be a bootstrapper’s marketing “dilemma”. We arrived at the following. As you make money from providing services and use profits to fund product development, you need to [...]

Inside a Lean Startup: How We Use Blogging to Document Business Model Assumptions

tor — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:40:48 +0000

Earlier I wrote about doing a minimum viable blog and briefly discussed how a blog in fact could transform into a potential product. Feedback was evident of that several entrepreneurs/ bloggers had the similar experiences. Today, I am launching a small experiment taking this idea one step further. Here is how I’ll use this blog to document our own business model hypothesis. Simple structure of the business model testing scheme As a part of some recent changes to this blog (moved to own domain), I have added a new structure that follows the Business Model Canvas. This means that all [...]

Asymmetric Motivation: A Viable Marketing Strategy For Small Businesses?

tor — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:45:56 +0000

People need shoes. There is a grand market for shoes. Zappos has proven it. Big Shoes dubbed “Store Sko” in Norwegian, a small shop in my neighborhood that sells (guess what) big shoes, has proven it. The shop has been running profitable for years. Big Shoes is master of segmentation marketing. Asymmetric motivation Big Shoes has a positioning advantage – competitors, incumbents and mainstream shoe shops are reluctant to pursue the market of abnormal shoe sizes. First, the market is not perceived large and hence lucrative enough compared to mainstream markets. Second, customized shoes require customized inventory and production lines. Niche [...]

Minimum Viable Blog: What Blogging Taught Me About Startup Methods in 2010

tor — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 23:58:26 +0000

As of now I have not yet shared with you any post on lessons learned from 2010. Not better, I believe that I have been neglecting this blog for the last couple of months. That will not be the case for 2011. Here is why. Early and often This blog was started at the very end of 2009. Prior to this, I had attempted to start blogging several times. Each time I’d configure the LAMP stack, source a cool WordPress theme, and fine tune look-and-feel. My mind was completely locked-in on the technicalities – I never got to write any [...]

7 WordPress Themes for Launching your Minimum Viable Product

tor — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 09:12:12 +0000

By leveraging the web in creation of rapid prototypes for testing business model assumptions, and using customer feedback to develop them, companies will be able to advance in its’ search for a repeatable business model and reduce risk in new-product introduction. In creation of such rapid prototypes the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) idea is key. Neverthless, open source platforms such as WordPress are key enablers to the Lean Startup. As my previous post on 9 Minimum Viable Product WordPress Themes received pretty good interest among aspiring enterpreneurs, I decided to share some more recent WordPress themes that can help you in quickly [...]