Product Resources for Founders

A collection of tips and materials to help you on your way. It is a work in progress, and I'll continue to add things as I find them.

Process

Read the "Twelve Week MVP" article. This is an overview of the process that I use. I strongly recommend you do that first.

Take the FREE 7 step course to "Validate A Business Idea" before you build it.

Planning

Start by sketching out your business model with either of these two canvas types.

Customer Development

Read these online materials about how to do customer development.

  • Grasshopper Herder — a great collection of articles, interviews, and tools on how to actually to do the grunt work of customer development.
  • Precoil — everything these guys have to say is worth listening to. They've seen it all.
  • Customer Development Labs — Justin has a fantastic set of resources on customer development and getting to that first sale ASAP.
  • Talking to Humans — the best book, hands-down, on conducting customer interviews.

Testing Tools and Hacks

These are some software tools that you can use to run fast experiments.

  • Survey Monkey — for collecting data from customers at scale. Not a replacement for interviews, but useful.
  • Quick MVP — to build a quick facade to test your idea in the market.
  • Instapage — more for building marketing landing pages incredibly fast.

Building Things Quickly

Once you're actually building stuff, don't reinvent the wheel.

  • Codenvy — to make a thing in the cloud and deploy it to the cloud.
  • Codeship — for simply unbeatable continuous deployment technology.
  • Theme Forest — for Pete's Sake! Don't make a custom design!
  • Ionic — to make a mobile app... with JavaScript... Now!

Ready to schedule a call?

Read everything here already? Wanna make it happen now?

Prefer email? That's fine. I am reachable at mcafee . sam at gmail . com