The Methodologist

When Co-founders Become Thieves: How My Startup Got Robbed and Why I Couldn’t Do Much About It

tor — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:27:01 +0000

WTF!?, I cried as I discovered that half of all the company’s cash equivalents had been withdrawn from its bank account. But when I found out who had made the withdrawal, I realized we had not been screwed. We had been robbed. The investors’ money, my face. It was gone. A short week earlier the company had held a board meeting. The director of the board and my partner (who I will keep anonymous) had naturally resigned, arguing that he wanted to focus on private matters. The board had been discussing the change of board seats and settlements, but disagreed. I have never [...]

Turn Your Blog Into a Business Model- and Customer Development Tool

tor — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 16:46:40 +0000

Business Model Press is based on Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0. Blogging is not only useful for introducing ideas. It’s also the primary way many companies communicate with and get feedback from their customers – making blogging a killer opportunity for business model- and customer development. After having more than 100 students and 20 startup teams doing exactly that – blog their business model – I learned that it helped the teams systemize collaboration, speed up the learning process, get going with customer development and more quickly take action on their business [...]

Heads-up on TechCrunch’s Take at Norwegian Startups: How The Problem Is The Problem

tor — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 10:08:05 +0000

See the full article on ArcticStartup. TechCrunch recently published a timely article questioning if Norway is leaving its tech startups out in the cold. Here’s why the discussion needs another angle and the problem in fact is the problem. Mike Butcher starts out comparing the ones of Spotify, Rovio, Tradeshift, and Everbread to the lack of evidence of successful startups from Norway, even pondering upon Opera as a half-fledged success. The arguments are as half the truth as pointing at Bipper and Wonderloop (both Norwegian semi-expats) as examples of the opposite. Founder migration Not very different from the case of Siri, Norwegians seems [...]

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’d consult lengthy articles only to find that there’s a jungle of advise out there. What you need are 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 are [...]

10 Scrappy Minimum Viable Products That Made It

tor — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 23:20:35 +0000

This collection 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 every 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 [...]

How To Use Your Blog To Document Business Model Assumptions

tor — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 17:40:48 +0000

In a previous post about minimum viable blogging I briefly discussed how a blog might transform into a potential product. I learned from several entrepreneurs and bloggers that they have had similar experiences. So today, I’m 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 posts will be categorized with [...]