Scott Bales stopped by JFDI to talk to the teams about Persona Development. His talk was by far one of the best I had seen on this topic—simple and loaded with anecdotal war stories.

It was great to hear him explain persona to the founders. Persona Development made sense, and sometimes was deemed trivial. Scott pointed this out, but also reassured the teams that it was extremely helpful when his team had painted 32 personas for Moven.com, a mobile bank he co-founded.

Focus on Behaviors

Scott emphasized this repeatedly—he reminded the founders to focus on behaviors of the target customers. In my experience working with teams on Persona Development, this was often the point where founders brushed over and missed. Often times entrepreneurs focused on facts (ie, demographic) over behaviors.

Behaviors were great assumptions to validate because they brought together a group of people that...

Today was Day 7 of the JFDI.2013B Bootcamp. The last two months our team worked our butts off—but we did it! Ten awesome teams joined our family on August 29th.

The past 8 weeks I slept very little. My eyes were glued to the monitors, responding to hundreds of emails, checking on our funnel metrics, and working around the clock interviewing teams. The recruitment exercises we went through taught me a lot. We made some great strides, and some mistakes: there were also some humbling surprises. Here are the numbers and our journey.

Sourcing for teams

For an accelerator program like JFDI, we served a few groups. Startup founders were our customers—one side of the puzzle. We targeted balanced teams with solid domain knowledge. About 1000+ founders registered on our landing page, with 320 teams completed the application. Compared to other landing pages, I thought this activation rate was...

In the midst of NSA and back-lash towards Cloud (I didn’t really pay too much attention), I still believed that Cloud is the governing trend in this generation of computing.

Recently, I was trying to nail down some personal investment theses. One of the trends Meng and I debated about surrounded Cloud. More specifically, we both agreed that the “last mile” was where some startups, especially BYOD, B2B and B2SMB, could make significant impact.

In other words, startups that focused on taking an early adopter technology and packaging it for early majority (in certain cases, in Asia, for Asia).

One of JFDI’s startups, Krake, obsessed itself with this trend. I recalled the very week the team read about Geoffrey Moore’s Bowling Pin strategy. While, technically, the theory was to identify the beachhead market and expanding from one segment to another, but by coupling with Moore’s Crossing...

Since March 2009, I read 58,319 items on Google Reader. Instead of mourning about the death of Google Reader, I wanted to share my feeds. I had 310 RSS subscriptions, and really valued the VC blogs and numerous Lean Startup and Customer Development posts that helped me grow in the last 4 years.

When I first got interested in the VC and startup world, I read a lot of Brad Feld and Fred Wilson. They were prolific and amazing writers. They also held nothing back. Mark Suster was great at breaking down a topic from both an investor’s and entrepreneur’s point of view. Chris Dixon was always inspiring. Nivi and Naval’s Venture Hacks had far more information than I could possibly digest. Steve Blank and the early days of Eric Ries’s Startup Lessons Learned blog shaped the way I thought about building products and entrepreneurship.

More recently, I read slightly differentiated stuff. I am a...

Hitting home runs are hard. Being confident is very different from being right.

Yesterday, I was talking to an entrepreneur and he told me his passion, but also his financial conundrum. He wanted to change direction to work on something more monetizable, but ultimately more limiting as a product. I couldn’t help but tell him to pursue his passion, and go all the way. In fact, why be an entrepreneur otherwise?

His concerns were real — cash running out was imminent — he had two months’ runway. We were debating. He drew from his personal experience from the past; similar situation. I shouted, “but that was different,” and quickly realized it was hard for me to counter him without any way to back up my claim.

Only this morning, did I come to realize what had bothered me, and what I should have stated clearer.

Fear of failure was a logical thing. In the next two months, if he didn’t make...

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...