Book details

Contents

Introduction
Chapter One – Why do startups fail?
Chapter Two – What is business development?

ACT I: Start the business flywheel
Chapter Three – Step 1: Create a hypothesis
Chapter Four – Step 2: Test the problem
Chapter Five – Step 3: Test the solution
Chapter Six – Step 4: Adapt or die
Chapter Seven – Nobody else matters
Chapter Eight – Know your early metrics
Chapter Nine – Running a successful pilot
Chapter Ten – Understanding why customers leave

ACT II: Increasing the business flywheel momentum
Chapter Eleven – Making new friends
Chapter Twelve – Negotiating your first contract
Chapter Thirteen – Choosing the right market
Chapter Fourteen – What the hell is product-market fit, anyway
Chapter Fifteen – Raising your first round
Chapter Sixteen – Find the right incentives
Chapter Seventeen – Prepare for the future scale

ACT III: Holding out for a hero
Chapter Eighteen – The final step

Illustrations

Hypothetical product demand curve. As the price goes up, the demand goes down and inversely. Increase the price and track customer churn to maximise your revenue.
Think about your market in terms of TAM (total available market), SAM (serviceable addressable market), SOM (serviceable obtainable market) and MOM (MVP obtainable market).
Difference in investment approaches between the US and EU investors. US investors tend to frontload most of the investment upfront and then only continue backing ‘winners’, whereas EU investors tend to wait until ‘winners’ emerge and then back them strongly.
The first term sheet is always the hardest.
Reality is always a bigger uphill battle than you expect. Behind each ‘overnight success’ there are years of execution and uncertainty.
The Business flywheel. It is a fundamental, cyclical part of the company process. Each step informs the next one. It takes a huge amount of energy to start the ‘flywheel’ – less to accelerate and even more so to maintain.
There is no set path to success, but there are tried and tested approaches that will help you to find it significantly faster. You are in control of your own story, so…
The business-development flywheel is a single step of the business flywheel, and a cyclical process that must always be done based on customer feedback. Its usefulness scales from products, which are whole companies, to single product features in a suite of offerings.
Technology adoption lifecycle and ‘The Chasm’. Business development focuses on innovators and early adopters to understand what problem to solve / what to build and where the target customers are, defining a sales process where there was none. Sales, on the other hand, focuses on majority and laggards, by taking and scaling the sales process. A lot of companies fail in exactly the transition from business development to sales because they fail to adapt to the different behaviours and buying patterns of the mainstream customers.
Less is more. The Lean Canvas is meant to capture the essence of your business, rather than an execution plan or multiple GTM strategies.
Interview Output Canvas. It is a framework for capturing your learnings and key takeaways after each customer development session. It not only captures what you learned, but also where in the buying cycle the potential customer is. Patterns will emerge that will inform your Lean Canvas and drive GTM strategy.
Interview Output Canvas. It is a framework for capturing your learnings and key takeaways after each customer development session. It not only captures what you learned, but also where in the buying cycle the potential customer is. Patterns will emerge that will inform your Lean Canvas and drive GTM strategy.
Different stages of the learning process through the business-development cycle. Feeling confident and stopping too early leaves you susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect bias, whereas having too many customer interviews will yield little actionable outcome due to the law of diminishing returns.
As a general rule, you want to learn from Rabbits and Elephants, while focusing your execution on Deers.
The build › measure › learn cycle over a product’s lifetime. It will take multiple iterations of building the minimum viable product (MVP), measuring customer behaviour and learning exactly how to deliver the most value to them, to then scale it and reach a product-market fit.
How to think about a minimum viable product (MVP). It should be something that delivers actual value to the customer from day one, and also represents a solution to the problem that meets customer expectations.
How to define a minimum viable product (MVP). Make it minimum – cut out everything that is not fundamental to delivering value. Make it viable – have just enough functionality to demonstrate value clearly.
Product feature prioritisation framework. Focus on the tasks (I–IV) with the highest return on investment (ROI) and the lowest amount of effort first.
Market flywheel. The bigger the market, the more competitors will be addressing it, the more that allows for differentiation, which in turn expands the market.
Exponential startup growth curve. The right early metrics are a key indicator for future growth and will guide you if you should continue or change directions.
On the outside, most companies and startups look polished, but the truth is, internally they are usually an absolute mess.

Additional Information

Paperback ISBN978-1-8383657-0-7
eBook ISBN978-1-8383657-1-4
Audiobook ISBN
(in progress — signup to mailing list for updates)		978-1-8383657-2-1
Paperback pages208
Paperback trim6 x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm), glossy cover,
black & white interior with white paper

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