Identify Competitive Solutions to Your Customers’ Problems

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Studying your competition is an ongoing pursuit in the entrepreneurial context. It is not something you do sporadically. Throughout the venture realization process, you identify and monitor all major and emerging competitors. You determine their strengths and weaknesses and consider how they will react to every one of your strategic moves. What some call competitive … Continue reading Identify Competitive Solutions to Your Customers’ Problems

Estimating Your Market Size

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An integral part of determining the attractiveness of a new venture opportunity is looking at your market's size. Throughout the venture realization process, you will have multiple opportunities to better assess the number of potential customers you have in any given marketplace. You will fine-tune your understanding of who your customer is and how many … Continue reading Estimating Your Market Size

Selecting Your Early Customers

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Deciding on which customers you should focus on as you launch your venture is an important decision. Getting this right can be the difference between the success or failure of your venture. Early in the venture realization process, you define who your potential customers are and whether they need your solution enough to pay for … Continue reading Selecting Your Early Customers

Customer Discovery: Surveying Early Customers

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While interviewing customers is a preferred method for early customer discovery, there are many reasons to consider using a survey or questionnaire to solicit customer information about the problem, current solutions, and desired benefits. One of the significant benefits of online surveys is the ability to reach large numbers of customers in a relatively short … Continue reading Customer Discovery: Surveying Early Customers

Customer Discovery: Early Interviews

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Introduction to Customer Discovery There are two stages of customer discovery in the venture realization process: 1) problem experience and; 2) solution experience. In the early stage of customer discovery, you are looking to validate assumptions about whether your venture idea is something specific customers need, want, and are willing to purchase. These assumptions are … Continue reading Customer Discovery: Early Interviews

See an Opportunity? Now What?

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See an Opportunity? Now What? You have an idea and are excited to start a new venture. Now what? As you begin to formulate the concept, you will want to conduct a preliminary assessment of the potential opportunity. There are several issues to address to determine whether a new venture idea is worth pursuing. No … Continue reading See an Opportunity? Now What?

Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution

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A new MBA class started last week, and as I was going over the class overview, one of the students asked, "As a team, where do we start?" As I was giving my response, I realized that this is a question I continually obsess over: What is the best way for an entrepreneur to identify … Continue reading Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution

Embrace Your Superpowers!

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In the last post, I discussed the role that entrepreneurial resilience can play in both a new venture's success and a founders' well-being.  Now, I want to explore with you the importance of character strength development and its application to the venture realization process. I  have worked with strength development approaches for several years, dating … Continue reading Embrace Your Superpowers!

Resiliency: A Key to Entrepreneurial Wellbeing

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As the term comes to a close, we have been discussing the plans that each of the founding teams has for their venture. What are your short and long-term action plans as you head towards an eventual launch? During these round-robin discussions, one of the founders expressed with both excitement and some trepidation, "what a wild, chaotic … Continue reading Resiliency: A Key to Entrepreneurial Wellbeing

Entrepreneurship: A Balancing Act

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When teaching entrepreneurship and associated innovation activities, I am always asked if there are any specific characteristics that successful entrepreneurs and innovators commonly manifest.  My short response is yes, there are observable behaviors that can be seen as correlated with innovation, but so much depends on such factors as an individual's cognitive style (and resulting cognitive biases), situational … Continue reading Entrepreneurship: A Balancing Act