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Early Customer Stage

Appreciate Why Prospects Say “Your Baby Is Ugly”
Posted on Friday, September 3, 2010 - 00:23 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
My second job out of college was with an  early EDA software startup. I was employee #13 and I was a “project manager, marketing and sales.” Which meant in reality that I did both pre and post-sales support.  Over time I focused more on post sales  support but in the beginning there were just two of us handling all of the prospects and customers from technical support perspective.  They hired a third pre-sales support engineer and the three of us worked at common table with one phone.
Sean Murphy
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Chalk Talk on Technology Adoption
Posted on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - 22:57 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
--> Get Adobe Flash player --> I did this with the DreamSimplicity folks last month. It’s a chart I have been drawing in various customer meetings for the last several years or so and they thought it would make for a good short video. The challenge was lighting the whiteboard appropriately.  I think it came out well. I welcome any feedback or suggestions for other topics. I will post a transcript next week.
Sean Murphy
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3 Equations & 3 Unknowns: Customers, Features, Message
Posted on Thursday, August 26, 2010 - 23:34 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
We put the interview I did with Floyd Tucker of DreamSimplicity about a month ago but in the last two days I have had two people comment to me directly and one tweet about my “three equations and three unknowns” answer: @dorait Sean: Startups are trying to solve 3 equations with three unknowns – http://bit.ly/dq7Sqd Here is the relevant excerpt from the transcript: FLOYD TUCKER:  [...] Can you tell me a little bit about the early customer stage? SEAN MURPHY: We just spend a lot of time on this.  It’s a very
Sean Murphy
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Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups Part 2
Posted on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 - 22:51 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Ed Weissman (edw519 on HN) had another  great comment recently on Hacker News at  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424446 that builds on “Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups” (I have added some hyperlinks for context) Enterprise software sucks. We don’t talk about it much here at HN, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once.
Sean Murphy
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Ed Weissman on B2B Opportunities for Startups
Posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - 01:46 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Ed Weissman (edw519 on HN) had a great comment a while back on Hacker News at  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83561 that I got his permission to re-publish here: My target market is small business. 3 Reasons They Prefer Pay Over Free: They don’t want their employees looking at ads. They need leverage when they have complaints.
Sean Murphy
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Steve Blank Plans to Crowdsource E-Schools
Posted on Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - 00:30 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Steve Blank gave a thought provoking talk at the Startup Lesssons Learned Conference on “Customer Development 2.0: Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” (slides here and related blog post “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” which is part of a category of blog posts on “Durant vs. Sloan“).  He also referenced Robert Shedd’s list of startup accelerators “Help for Startups!
Sean Murphy
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Common Mistakes in New Product Introduction Demos
Posted on Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - 09:08 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
A baker’s dozen of common mistakes that I have seen founders make in preparing, delivering, and evaluating a new product presentation/demo. Don’t keep giving the same presentation if it’s not working.
Sean Murphy
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The Business is Everyone’s Business
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2010 - 04:00 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
“A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what’s going on–what’s going in, what’s moving around, what’s coming out. That’s the only way to make sure people understand what you’re doing, and why, and have some input into deciding where you are going. Then, when the unexpected happens, they know how to react and react quickly.
Sean Murphy
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Iron Bars, Plexiglass, and Masking Tape
Posted on Thursday, February 18, 2010 - 01:01 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
I can always tell when I am feeling stressed because I dream about being back in school taking an exam I haven’t studied for. Although to be candid some of those dreams are closer to suppressed memories than unrealized anxieties bubbling up from my unconscious. But a year or two ago I had a dream a while ago about a tiger that I keep turning over in my mind. A tiger is pacing in a cage, but it’s not a square cage, it’s more of a maze. It’s not in a zoo, more like a warehouse or strangely configured storage unit.
Sean Murphy
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I Don’t Understand, We Won the Argument, Why Didn’t We Win The Sale?
Posted on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 - 02:20 by Sean Murphy from the site SKMurphy
Three true stories: We were driving back from a sales call and the CTO said “I don’t understand. We won the argument. Why didn’t we win the sale?” He was very disappointed at their stupidity and stubbornness. Different startup, I had been recruited by a new CEO as a part of a turnaround. A team had gone off to meet with a new prospect and I asked the sales rep how the meeting had gone. He said “It was one of those meetings where the actual purpose of the meeting became figuring out who the smartest person in the room was: one of our guys or one of theirs.
Sean Murphy
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