Reframe outcomes, abstraction, scenarios, continuous discovery, peripheral problems, smart sailboat, brainstorm alone shortlist together.
use customer discovery to find high-priority problems significant segments struggle with, clarify your target customers and build the right product for them.
The article provides examples, data, and questions to help you evaluate your idea and market at each step. It also warns you about common pitfalls and misconceptions that can lead to failure.
Lots of data pointing to discounting being a bad strategy
Validation and discovery have opposite objectives
A pretty clear guide to B2B cold sales calls, with an example, objection handling tips, and a template.
How to set up your website for good design + SEO, and aligns a lot with the messages from Donald Miller's Building a Storybrand
Getting clarity on the BIG picture and articulating it well
Future Anything
The University of Queensland
Future Anything
UTS
The University of Queensland
Monash University
STELR STELR (Science and Technology Education Leveraging Relevance) is a national initiative of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering.
The University of Queensland
Education Change Makers
Murray Hurps, UTS
Queensland University of Technology
James Davis 2018
Global Entrepreneurship Network
Murray Hurps, UTS
The University of Queensland
Hunter Futurepreneurs Program
Colin Jones
Colin Jones; Kathryn Penaluna & Andy Penaluna 2020
Princes Trust Australia
Janne Elo & Berit Kurtén 2019
The University of Queensland
The University of Queensland
Global Entrepreneurship Network
Peter Thiel & Blake Masters
Damien Meunier
Colin Jones
Spark Festival
Spark Festival
Strategyzer
European Commission's - Joint Research Centre's: Science and Knowledge Hub
NSW Department of Education
Clayton M Christensen
Andrew Penaluna; Kathryn Penaluna; Radmil Polenakovikj 2020
Colin Jones
Entre Ed
European Commission's - Joint Research Centre's: Science and Knowledge Hub
European Commission's - Joint Research Centre's: Science and Knowledge Hub
Murray Hurps, UTS
The University of Queensland
European Commission's - Joint Research Centre's: Science and Knowledge Hub
Global Entrepreneurship Network
Eric Ries
The Academy for Enterprising Girls
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Murray Hurps, UTS
European Commission's - Joint Research Centre's: Science and Knowledge Hub
Future Anything
Academcy for Enterprising Girls
Murray Hurps, UTS
Fred Korthagen & Angelo Vasalos 2005
Strategyzer
ABCN
Startup Status
Future Anything
Wade Institute of Entrepreneurship
Spark Festival
European Commission's - Joint Research Centre's: Science and Knowledge Hub
Insights into the NSW Youth Entrepreneurial Education Ecosystem
Entre Ed
Future Anything
customers only search for solutions to their highest-priority problems
Understanding the importance or lack thereof of each SEO factor
We have not found a single market where customer needs are homogenous. Yet, time and time again, companies design products for the average customer.
How to find your product market fit without leaving out the channels and business model
building an MVP should (1) clarify what founders need to understand about customers before building anything, (2) help founders identify the minimum amount of product that would need to be built to validate their idea, and (3) very specifically outline what features should be excluded entirely from the MVP.
Possible reasons why your startup is worth joining, and how to communicate them well
A Framework for Data-Driven Product and Customer Discovery Research.
"I really wish founders went in with the mindset of, 'I don't care if it takes two years to work'. How do you set your mind up so that you are not immediately disappointed”
Practical "how-to" level to improve sales performance, from lead prospecting to close.
Data mining uses statistics from large amounts of data to learn about target markets and customer behaviours
Ethnography is based on observing existing or prospective customers to learn how they use a product or service.
Quick tips: 1. Build prototypes and test your early ideas on real customers; listen to their responses, and anything short of “I want this!” is really a “No thanks.” 2. Don’t build a full product until you’re feeling real pull from the market. 3. Figure out who you can sell to most easily, and start there. Market analysis can come later. 4. Develop a product that unlocks revenue for your customers.
How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale
7 fairly basic strategies to brainstorm startup ideas
What is a good vs great growth rate from an investor’s perspective?
Studies show that new products fail at the stunning rate of between 40% and 90%
Needs-Based Segmentation: A Step-by-Step Guide For Startups
great article for everyone to get a good perspective on the value of community, regardless of what you’re building (company or a podcast). Building an amazing product and experience is only half of the picture. The rest and arguably the important remaining half is the community who are on this journey with you because they’re inspired by your mission. Pivots are inevitable so product etc will change; but the loyal community you build and look after will always be an asset to learn from and bounce off ideas.
In this lesson students understand the value of customer interviews to validate several aspects of their business model. They hear what a customer interview sounds like and learn how much easier it is to design, and market, a product to customers after having spoken to them.
Your goal as a founder is to learn. Learning in the most efficient way possible means balancing learning deeply and moving quickly. Surveys achieve neither.
How to validate the idea you’ve identified as a problem and develop a hypothesis of the solution.
In this exercise, students get to learn the importance of storytelling as they design and build one-of-a-kind paper aircraft and try to convince the rest of the class that their design will fly the best. A lesson from teachingentrepreneurship.org
A blog from teachingentrepreneruship.org about using process pitches vs shark tank pitches how to improve student pitches using
A lesson created by Teaching Entrepreneurship.org. To introduce students to the 9 components of the BMC, Dr. Osterwalder starts by giving students a set of business model hypotheses and asking them to place each one in the appropriate box of the BMC.
A great guide cover product discovery and retrospectives telling the Miro success method
Download the BMC template here
Business model breakdown of a Youtuber.
Article explaining the 9 building blocks of the BMC with examples.
Video that explain the SCAMPEr technique by referencing Uber.
Simple rules to level up your brainstorming game.
An animated series exploring the process of a startup, idea to business. By Strategyzer and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
6min video explaining how to create a Customer Persona using an Empathy Map.
A YouTube series where entrepreneurs have an elevator ride to pitch their ideas. Great for analysing pitch techniques.
Animated video explaining the 5 stages of the DT process. Created by Invision
Animated video explaining what an entrepreneur is. Created by BGC Canada
Shedding light on what Airtree means by "signals of product-market fit (PMF)"
Marketing through your audience’s existing sources of influence. It works!
This playbook will focus on why you should effectively apply Behavioral Design Methodologies and Tools in health care – and how to do it
There are lots of tests we can run but there is a time and a place for all of them and it is best not to fix them up!
Valuable insights into how to put together your pitch deck with evaluations
From this process, you’ll get a short document that defines what you’re building, why you’re building it, who your core audience is, what your company values are, and a few ways to think about your company’s positioning in the market.
Pitchfest is an opportunity for kids to pitch their business or charity ideas to a panel of entrepreneurs and business people. The aim of Pitchfest is to help kids realise their potential and inspire other kids to feel confident in their abilities, to be creative and feel empowered to bring an idea to life.
Pitchfest is an opportunity for kids to pitch their business or charity ideas to a panel of entrepreneurs and business people. The aim of Pitchfest is to help kids realise their potential and inspire other kids to feel confident in their abilities, to be creative and feel empowered to bring an idea to life.
Pitchfest gives kids an opportunity to pitch their charity or business ideas to a panel of entrepreneurs and business people. The aim of Pitchfest is to help kids realise their potential and inspire other kids to feel confident in their abilities, to be creative and feel empowered to bring an idea to life.
Pitchfest gives kids an opportunity to pitch their charity or business ideas to a panel of leading entrepreneurs and business people from around the world. The aim of Pitchfest is to help kids realise their potential and inspire other kids to feel confident in their abilities, to be creative and feel empowered to bring an idea to life.
Pitchfest gives kids an opportunity to pitch their charity or business ideas to a panel of entrepreneurs and business people. The aim of Pitchfest is to help kids realise their potential and inspire other kids to feel confident in their abilities, to be creative and feel empowered to bring an idea to life.
Pitchfest is an online production and entrepreneurial program giving kids an opportunity to pitch their charity and business ideas to a panel of leading entrepreneurs and business people from around the world. The aim of Pitchfest is to help kids realise their potential and inspire other kids to feel confident in their abilities, to be creative and feel empowered to bring an idea to life.
A documentary about young web entrepreneurs in the U.S. and Europe. It contains interviews with the founders of Vimeo, Soundcloud, Kiip, InDinero, Dropbox, Foodspotting and many others who talk about how they started their company and their lives as an entrepreneur.
A short video in which Eric Ries discusses how to go about testing before a product is created.
How to define a market segment as a group of people who have in common a role inside a context and they are facing the same problem that triggers a specific emotion.
This personalities test is a useful exercise to complete with students to assist with startup team formation.
A useful team building exercise for emerging startup teams.
A 48 page guide to help students with developing their startup branding (covers brand identity, brand names, logos, colors and brand voice).
A tool for encouraging students to pitch their startup using storytelling.
This worksheet is a great tool for startup teams to evaluate what is working and what needs to change.
The Customer Empathy Map by XPlane is a valuable tool to ensure change is designed in a people-centered way.
Contains slides and lesson plan for a Design Thinking challenge. Students are tasked with design a backpack for specific customer needs.
Read this book to substantially improve your innovation toolbox and process. It shows you what to do (and what to avoid) in order to succeed.
This is a free online webapp for creating Business Model Canvases.
Deciding what metrics startups should follow and how. Best suited to post-launch startups, pre-seed and seed stage
Change what you are asking, change how you are asking it and change the perception.
Your mom is lying to you! How do you find out the truth?
Get a mindmap of the type of questions searched to help you write content
it’s important to have a strong understanding of what product/market fit looks like before investing in growth
We learned more in 2 hours using this stack ranking approach than we did in 100+ customer discovery interviews.
The Field Guide includes a step by step guide to help answer the questions: What is impact investing? How does it compare to traditional investing and how is it different to philanthropy? How is impact investing evolving worldwide? And in Australia? Why is it important for foundations? What are Australian charitable trusts and foundations doing about it?
Price your offering according to how much value/usage it delivers to each customer
Copywriting can do amazing things for website traffic and this guide is full of actionable techniques.
Look through import data for manufacturers and sales trend insights
How can you go even more minimal here?
Below, we’re going to help you: 1. Understand how your product will grow 2. Put this understanding into practice 3. Avoid common growth pitfalls
Positioning defines how your product is a leader at delivering something that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about.
In this beginner’s guide to term sheets you will see what a term sheet is, what its role is in the investment process, why you should be using term sheets and how they can be effectively utilised. You’ll also learn some common terms and clauses and why they're included, and term sheets for different situations.
How to build a business with a passionate community around it.
Beginners guide to financial modelling, learn what investors are looking for in a financial model
Every business has finite resources which need to be pointed at the markets with the greatest yield
Invest the time to get to know them before trying to email them
For founders who are figuring out their go-to-market for B2B companies.
Designed especially for DTC brands ~$5M to +$15M: (V x CR x LTV) - VC = $
340+ VCs, accelerators, angel networks, conferences, platforms, and communities supporting women innovators
Damian Holz goes through the process of innovating with design thinking and Jobs to be Done
It’s hard and uncomfortable to do new things, which tempts us to spend months of planning and creation in isolation to get it right. But you don’t learn anything in the basement.
Advice from experience about co-founding relationships
The most successful companies optimize monetization in some manner every quarter
A detailed guide to the best practices of winning government tenders
Everything you could possibly want to learn about landing pages
• Identify indicators of a success in relation to change • Identify importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence • Activate new ways of thinking about success and how to measure success
• Identify indicators of a student’s success in relation to change • Identify the importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence • Activate new ways of thinking about success and how to measure success
Farmers are entrepreneurs and innovators who use their initiative to solve problems daily.
How can universities better support the transition between graduation and higher education so that more young people are prepared to apply an entrepreneurial approach to future challenges?
How to embed sustainable and scalable change into schools and school systems
Which program provides the skills best suited to your students needs, and the goals of your curriculum?
Talks through the use of titles, hiring and onboarding
A deep dive into the how-to's of building marketplaces
Want to solve a big problem but don’t know where to start? Got a great idea but can’t find the time?
If you have ever wondered what Design Thinking, the Business Model Canvas, Agile, Lean Startup and an MVP is, this session is a great icebreaker.
There are just three growth lanes for consumer startups looking to scale customer acquisition
A very large collection of all sorts of legal contracts and templates
A simple methodology of breaking down a wicked problem and then presenting it in a way that probes curiosity and fosters an entrepreneurial mindset.
The Academy for Enterprising Girls is a website jam-packed with great stories and inspiring videos to help young Australian girls like yourself build core skills to start your own business
Bubble's "How To Build" series contains step-by-step walkthroughs and tutorials that show you how you can create any type of web application, no code necessary.
“It is the ‘golden rule’ applied to leadership,” Dholakia says. “Try to be the kind of leader that you would want to work for.”
Today, information is free and abundant. What remains scarce is insight.
Don't waste your time on great ideas that are meant for other people.
Do you believe design to be a key differentiator for your business?
Building moats is hard, examples might make it easier
Startup's Playbook for Running Impactful Virtual Offsites
Lots of good tips about completely remote onboarding
The whole journey mapped out
Starting point to identify interesting, unsolved problems in the world that may turn in to great startups
A set of tools and methods developed by teaching team members, students, as well as designers from around the world
The goal of the calculation is to obtain an estimated range for your Customer's Lifetime Value
GPT-3-powered business idea generator
Deep dive into the idea of leading through product first
How to pitch your startup. Podcast interview with Colin Kinner, Founder of Startup Onramp.
Goes through execution vs patents and when patents are important and why
OK - 1:1s align you on the week. Great - 1:1s are a forum for feedback. Exceptional - 1:1s are a place for reflection and upgrading.
Frameworks for practice, like matching practice with your final product and the importance of purposefully doing something wrong.
This is a great read on doing the right thing as a manager to achieve the optimal outcome
There’s a real, psychological fulfillment of being “in” with the crowd and stoking envy among those around you
A library of all the tools to build a business without code
A Curated Directory Of Tools And Resources To Build Internet Communities
Startups tackling a mission first
This is a huge library of teaching material for entrepreneurship in many different contexts
Down with marketing funnels up with growth loops
The WOM Coefficient tracks the rate that active users generate new users via word of mouth
Library for VC focused Founders
A step in the right direction to level the playing field of investment
A deep dive into software design and development
Talks to the complicated nature of people management
A technique for making difficult decisions from Google, Facebook and Square
Pitching Checklist & Evaluation Template
You are lucky if someone looks at your business and gives you advice
The feedback; 'Not yet', tells people they are on a learning journey that they can make
Hobbies aid in recovering from work
Don't think you know an industry that you don't
Technical founders guide to learning enterprise sales
Goes through 3 good techniques with great examples when doing user testing
You take money from someone and they are now relying on your business to succeed
Goes through the creation of a digital prototype build from a paper prototype
Creating a great survey is like designing a great user experience
Best source of growth was word of mouth
Surveys are very ineffective if done poorly, here is how to do it right
Observation as the starting point for innovation
You don't need to build things in order to validate it
You need to experiment in order to figure out what channel is going to give you traction
Keep all prototypes and keep it out in the open and engage with it
Explains the gap between MVP with early adopters and minimal viable revenue (break-even) and then minimal viable traction where things start to take off
Great examples about when to use closed and open questions
A great product does not equal large scale growth
Talks to marketing experimentation as well as explaining CPA and LTV really well
Argues 100 fans paying $1000 per year will be the passion economies future
Finding unmet needs through engaging with and observing patients, family, doctors, etc.
Goes through some of the potential platforms to use for the coding prototypes
Goes through the main points of journey mapping
Giant list of different sectors by their margins in the US
Definitions and explanation of fixed and variable costs
Breaks down an example of a good homepage and why is works
Debt and equity simple definitions and the purpose to put cash into the business
The importance and how-to of self maintenance from Silicon Valley's perspective
Breaks down a good landing page and why it is good
Judging new ideas should start by brainstorming yourself about something unrelated
A deep dive into how to create a marketplace business
A deep dive into creating compelling value propositions
Don't be secretive about ideas, they will die if you do
Learn all the great things that no-code can do
You want to increase the engagement with early adopters, this is some ideas on how
A comprehensive list of tools used to perform competitive analysis of brands and businesses through digital channels.
Why you should have a startup accountability email list
it’s not as simple as just hosting a webinar. There’s a lot more to a virtual event than that.
Most things don't scale, as a business grows you need to reinvent things anyway
Great detailed overview of the whole capital raising space from a US perspective
Checks whether a name is taken across multiple platforms
Goes through a detailed example of an interview to determine JTBD
Bad pitch example but a great breakdown afterwards
Use stuff (tangibles) they help (1) energise the group, (2) reduce distractions, (3) help to understand value
A list by Airtree of mental health services
Goes through what VC's in Australia are really looking for
Lots of good points covered really fast
Goes through the 5 stages of a solution interview with a good examples
The digital product design platform powering the world’s best user experiences
Surveys cannot be used as validation
Talks about the importance of purpose through the whole business journey
Start with context, create a knowledge gap, introduce the required concepts one at a time, use metaphors where possible and give examples.
If the target customer profile is too wide and the feature set to broad the startup is doomed from the beginning
Goes through the need of having a specific user description
Keep the 25 percent of lifetime margin as a customer acquisition cost rule in mind.
Talks with an Australian perspective on international capital raising and the pro's and con's
Success does not make mental well-being
Goes through the importance of silence with both good and bad examples
If you serve all your customers you will eventually become a Frankensteins's monster, instead focus on the customers who would miss you the most as they are most likely to be the most profitable as well