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.
- Business Model Canvas — if you are innovating a wholly new business model.
- Lean Canvas — if you are building a new product with a known business model.
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