Ebookmakr Failure: The Fallacy of Knowing What to Build – The Post Mortem

Executive Summary – Lessons Learned from Ebookmakr’s Failure:

  1. Love the problem more than your solution.
  2. Don’t push too far your dreams of China in your hand.
  3. Use prototyping tools such as Marvel when running user interviews. (More here: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority.)
  4. Be careful with the selection process for user interviews: You might end up picking those that will support your vision – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy trap.
  5. Beware of false positives in user interviews.
  6. Never start writing a single line of code before an appropriate number of customers signed up. (For clarification: Customers are paying users.)
  7. Never spend money on developing a prototype when you’re not working full-time on growing the user-base and increasing customer value.
  8. Be patient and give your product the time it needs.
  9. Always make branded t-shirts and wear them later regularly to preserve the recollection of the disaster. (See below.)
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Food for Thought #12: Holacracy, Customer Value, What Is Success, The Feed

Age of Product’s Food for Thought on October 25th, 2015 on: Holacracy w/ Tony Hsieh of Zappos, customer value driven product design, what is “success” w/ Jerry Colonna & Brad Feld, slaves of the feed, how Bigcommerce started, 2015 Pacific Crest SaaS Survey, Software Eats Healthcare and how Expensify doubled its customer base.

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Food for Though #11: MVP, Agile Failure Patterns, Notifications, Definition Of Success

Age of Product’s Food for Thought on October 18th, 2015 on MVP best practices, agile failure patters in organizations, the rule of notifications, success and being yourself, the Failure of Everest, bubble talks and what it takes to build an entrepreneurial ecosystems:

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