When building your product, it’s important to get off the ground correctly by finding your first customers, gathering customer feedback and shipping your first minimum viable product. Once your product has launched and your market is enjoying what you have to offer, there is an important approach to take to ensure you’re staying relevant, satisfying your customers and enhancing your product to continue adding value. Today, I’ll run through the approach of what I refer to as the Lean Startup Loop.
Tag: Inspiration
When in need, seek out a little bit of inspiration to get you through the day.
Batman doesn’t get paid
Bruce Wayne, however, is a multi-billionaire. While not much emphasised as a contrast within the Batman storyline (rather choosing to emphasise Batman and Bruce Wayne as one in the same), I feel this contrast between Batman and Bruce Wayne has a hidden message I’d like to explore further.
Achieving harmony through micro-uncluttering
Everyone has their own definition of clutter. To many, clutter constitutes large amounts of “stuff” piling up in a space which should not usually contain so much of said “stuff”. While focussing on day to day tasks, I’ve noticed that there are several areas of my day to day which have high potential for clutter. When these areas are cluttered, I feel like my focus shifts and isn’t as sharp as it could be. Today, I’d like to help reform our views on what creates mental clutter, and how to overcome this and achieve laser-like focus.
Finding What Drives You
While in the gym this morning, doing lunges with a barbell on my back, I experienced the best feeling I’ve experienced during a workout; the feeling of zoning out. This lead me to question; “am I zoning out, or simply zoning in on the task?” After completing the last set of lunges, my trainer was extremely impressed and said “great job, Matt! That was a great set of lunges! I’m very impressed!”. Now normally, my trainer enjoys taking the “drill sergeant” approach, preferring to motivate with “come on, you owe me another 5”. Outside of the workout sets, he’s really smiley and happy, so this drill sergeant approach feels somewhat out of character. For some, it works. For me, I’ve not always felt it to be the best motivator. Today, I discovered why and (most importantly) what is a motivator for me.
The journey versus the outcome
We’ve recently had some landscaping done, at home. While the end result is absolutely beautiful, there is one aspect of the project which didn’t sit too well with me. While working from home, I’m aware of all of the goings on with the landscaping, can view the progress day to day and can also hear the project lead bossing her team around. I use the term “bossing” as my personal interpretation of how the project was handled. This got me thinking about project management and what the project manager cares more about; the journey or the outcome.
Knowing Your Limits And Gaming Yourself
Since starting this blog several years ago, I’ve tried several techniques to keep up a regular blogging routine. From blogging daily for a week or two, to attempting to blog every day for an entire year, I’ve tried them all.
While this blog isn’t a business for me, it’s a great way to share knowledge, thoughts and interesting discoveries. At the same time, I simply cannot dedicate all day every day to blogging, researching and constructing articles. Ultimately, it’s also not how I most enjoy writing.
So here’s what I’ve done.
You Are Who You Meet
Folks often say; “You are what you eat”. What does this even mean, anyways? While the underlying meaning is relatively clear (don’t eat junk food or you’ll become unhealthy), the saying itself makes little to no sense. I prefer to subscribe to the “you are who you meet” approach.
I’ve heard several folks say that we are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. Over the past few weeks, I’ve observed myself quite carefully and can confirm that this is mostly true, save for one key element.
Fostering creative thinking
At Woo, we recently picked up on the next steps of a StrengthsFinder assessment we conducted within our leadership team towards the end of 2013. This assessment aims to identify your top 5 strengths and assist you in harnessing them, while creating a better understanding of the strengths others possess and how best to relate to those you work with daily. The follow up steps of this assessment included a call with a leadership coach, where in we discuss our strengths, answer a few questions and better understand how to create the next steps in our strengths finding journey.
During my call with Horace (our coach), he mentioned the following, which stuck with me; “If you can explain to someone how you perform a particular task, that task is a learned behaviour. If you can’t explain the exact steps, that task is an inherent strength”. For me, this task was product architecture and analysis.
As I’ve mentioned before, I really enjoy listening to podcasts. I listen to a wide variety of different topics, and attempt to glean value from each, and apply that value in different contexts. One of those topics relates to creativity.
Crafting meaningful customer relationships
When setting up a service or product-based business, there is a concept referred to as “lock in”, where the customer buys in to your ecosystem and, as they add products to their purchase history, it becomes increasingly more difficult to switch away to a competitor.
While corresponding over an email chain with friends this morning, we started talking about software licenses and how to interface between clients and purchasing software licenses for use on client projects (in particular, referring to licenses for WordPress plugins and themes). The topic of multi-site licenses came up, with the idea that the license can be purchased once and re-sold to several clients who can each cover a portion of the maintenance code. On the surface, this looks like a great idea, as each customer gets to pay a bit less than the overall fee, and doesn’t have any responsibility to maintain the license and pay the renewal fee each year.
Here’s why I disagree with this approach.
Starve fear. Feed courage.
Every negative thought we have, or action we take, feeds our fear. When you trust in your heart and take enjoyment out of your day, this feeds your courage. I feel it’s important to include this short summary at the very beginning, rather than at the end, as it’s important to regularly emphasise this key principle.
I’m really enjoying listening to podcasts lately. While I switch from time to time, the most fun I have across all podcasts I listen to is extracting the “hidden meaning”. How to apply what is being said in an alternate context. In this case, the meaning was a bit less hidden, given the episode was about courage and listening to yourself.