7 Ways to Easily Get Valuable Customer Feedback With Contextual Micro-Surveys
If you’ve ever managed or built a product, you know that gathering and analyzing customer feedback is hard.
It’s time-consuming; you have to spend hours prospecting customers and following up to schedule interviews or collect surveys. More often than not, the responses received aren’t specific enough or lack the context necessary for in-depth analysis. Not only do you have to collect, clean, and organize your data, but you also need it to be relevant and meaningful. What if I told you that there was a better solution for this?
How Do You Know if Your Product Features Are Going to Make an Impact?
There’s nothing more inefficient than building the wrong things, so how do you know if your product features are going to make an impact? I’ve covered the Pirate Metrics framework as a way to evaluate and prioritize features from a business perspective, but what we really want to know is the impact a feature makes from the user’s perspective. For that, we need a slightly different model.
The Infomercial Madlib – How to create a fun elevator pitch that’s on point
It’s hard to develop a really good elevator pitch. You’ve probably been in this situation. You’re at a networking event, and someone asks you what your product does. Maybe you’ve been trying to clearly convey to potential investors how your product solves a real problem and is better than the competitors.
I’ve been there myself. I was running a Lean Canvas workshop a few years ago when the perfect analogy came to me. You know who absolutely nails the sales message in a short amount of time?
Infomercials.
8 Reasons I Failed, and You Can Succeed, to Build a Successful Software Business
My entire career has been focused on building complex systems and executing with ruthless efficiency. As CTO at my last company, I earned the nickname “The Executioner”, because of my relentless drive to Get. Shit. Done.
But it wasn’t enough…
How to Understand What Your Customers Really Want: Creating a Scalable Customer Feedback Engine
In order to build a product your customers love, you need to get inside their heads. It’s not enough to understand what they do, you must understand why. This requires you to interact with your customers on a deep, personal level and gather data from various perspectives. Early on, you should spend a significant proportion of your time gathering user feedback, and as the company grows, you must invest in developing the systems and processes to make it a part of the DNA of your company.
10 Things You Must Do to Avoid Entrepreneur Burnout
I wasn’t sleeping, I didn’t have time to exercise or eat well, and I started drinking more to cope. I was fighting with my CEO and my wife on a daily basis. I would wake up at 5am with a rush of panic because I knew I was already behind and there was nothing I could do. I accepted the fact that every single day I was going to fail my family, my company, and myself.
Forget the #Hustle/#Grind/#CrushIt mentality – This is the #1 Secret Weapon of Successful Entrepreneurs
I’m completely, philosophically opposed to the Gary V school of thought that success is created by sheer force of will, that grinding 16 hours a day every day will make you successful. Yes, there are going to be crunch periods, and yes, building a successful business takes a lot of work, but this #Hustle culture creates the mindset that you, the founder, are like Atlas, with the weight of the world on your shoulders. I’m here to tell you that this approach is not only wrong, it’s unhealthy, unsustainable, and unscalable.
How to Create an Incredibly Sticky Product with Gamification
Video game designers have mastered the art of creating engaging, rewarding, and addictive experiences. That’s what we all want to create in our products, right? When I look at any product, I look at it through the lens of game design. I want to share with you some key principles from game design that you can apply to your product to get your customers engaged and keep them coming back for more.
The Great Startup Filter – Why Do 90% of Startups Fail, and How Can You Be One of the Winners?
It’s common knowledge in the startup ecosystem that 90% of all startups fail. What we mean by this is that, of all the founders that begin building a product, only 10% come to a meaningful exit or acquisition. I’ve dedicated my career to helping entrepreneurs get through what I call “The Great Startup Filter” and become one of the few that make it big.
Focus and Flow – How to Avoid Distractions and Get Things Done
We live in a world full of distractions. Throughout our day we are constantly bombarded with notifications from email, Slack, and our phones. Our schedules are full of meetings, and our bosses and coworkers feel free to interrupt us without a second thought. How can we expect to get anything done if we can’t focus?