Pitching is super hard; I’ve heard a lot of pitches at events, and have also work with many teams to help them articulate their businesses. Most of the time, the pitches that I hear leave me hanging and wanting for more because I am left with a bunch of questions.

I understand why it’s hard to pitch a business. The founders I work with are often engineers and product managers. After staring at the businesses on a micro-level, it is extremely hard to break away from that and articulate the businesses and visions in a way that other people can understand.

In the last three months, I worked with 9 teams to help them frame their businesses at our accelerator program, JFDI.Asia in Singapore. I was there with them every step. From nailing down the problem that is worth solving, to experimenting with solutions, to capturing tractions; their babies are my babies in many ways.

In the back of...

Dan Shipper wrote a post on managing his reading habits. It’s very interesting to see his approach.

He used Evernote and some other tools to keep track of what he read and what to read next. I also talked to a few other people on how they kept track and retained what they learned.

Like Dan, I also recorded everything that I read in the last couple of years. From 2011-2013, I put the books I read in a spreadsheet.

Every year I would migrate the titles I didn’t get to, to the current year. Although the data set was not large (only over three years), I could see a pattern in the way I read.

I had a tendency to read through one author and related genre in clusters. I was way more fiction-oriented than non-fiction. These were not news to me, but I liked the anecdotal evidences to validate my hunch.

However, there was a limitation to this format. From looking at the spreadsheets, it...

This is a talk that I gave in Bangkok this week at Thumbs Up’s Start It Up, Power It Up 4

Lean Startup Customer Development Level: Tomb Raider

At JFDI.Asia, we help over 60% of our teams raise on average 500,000 dollars, including a Thai startup you may know, ShopSpot. Everyday I work with our teams and help them design weekly experiments.

It is not always easy. Sometimes the results from these experiments run against the teams’ assumptions, and even challenge their product visions. When that happens, we spend hours arguing about local maximums or sample bias, and deciding what to do next.

Over time, and especially in the last 80 days of our current bootcamp, I have come to appreciate some observations I made from working with our teams.

I started to think that running a Lean Startup is as if you are playing the video game — Tomb Raider — and before long, I will tell you what I...

I had the good fortune to work with many inspiring entrepreneurs from the US, Asia, Australia on Customer Development. I am also very fortunate to learn from seeing Kevin Dewalt, Justin Wilcox, Joel Gascoigne, Hiten Shah, Jason Evanish, Tristan Kromer, Trevor Owens, coaching entrepreneurs through the CustDev process.

Customer Development has always seem like a myth. As an entrepreneur new to the process, it is extremely jarring. A lot of people get disoriented by the type of questions that they should be asking, and are often overwhelmed by the mixed responses you receive.

In the past couple of months, I tried to hack my own process and came up with a spreadsheet system to make this iterative process as transparent and qualitatively measurable.

In three steps you can have a system that can be used in a loop, and allow you to figure out which questions are effective in a systematic...