BizClarity

In the course of looking for something else in the blogosphere, I came across the writings of Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur and professor at the Stanford Business School.  (He has a blog, and lots of his videos, podcasts, and articles are all over the Internet.  All good stuff.)

Prof. Blank is known for fresh thinking and new ideas on entrepreneurship that are firmly grounded in his real-world experience founding and running and investing in venture start-ups.  He has self-published a book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, that reportedly is as hard to read as it is revolutionary.

My plan was to get the book, read it, and then tell you about it.  But this morning I twice found myself describing some of the ideas to CEO’s I was talking to.  So I decided not to wait.

The fastest way to give you a taste for these ideas is to quote a big chunk of a blog post by Eric Reis on this blog Lessons Learned.  All that follows is a shameless cut-and-paste from Eric’s post.  The exact post is here.  Thanks Eric.

There’s so much crammed into The Four Steps to the Epiphany that I want to distill out what I see as the key points:

1. Get out of the building. Very few startups fail for lack of technology. They almost always fail for lack of customers. Yet surprisingly few companies take the basic step of attempting to learn about their customers (or potential customers) until it is too late. I’ve been guilty of this many times in my career – it’s just so easy to focus on product and technology instead. True, there are the rare products that have literally no market risk; they are all about technology risk (”cure for cancer”). For the rest of us, we need to get some facts to inform and qualify our hypotheses (”fancy word for guesses”) about what kind of product customers will ultimately buy.And this is where we find Steve’s maxim that “In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” Most likely, your business plan is loaded with opinions and guesses, sprinkled with a dash of vision and hope. Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you don’t have to give up on your dream. We just want you to get out of the building, and start finding out whether your dream is a vision or a delusion. Surprisingly early, you can start to get a sense for who the customer of your product might be, how you’ll reach them, and what they will ultimately need. Customer development is emphatically not an excuse to slow down or change the plan every day. It’s an attempt to minimize the risk of total failure by checking your theories against reality.
2. Read more

I found this slide deck while surfing SlideShare.   It from North Venture Partners from Oakland, California, a firm with progressive ideas for helping entrepreneurs.  Clearly this is a group that has seen a lot of start-ups fail and out of frustration are driven to prevent more companies from making the same mistakes.

All the points made in this deck ring true.  Some of the “fails” have to do generally with getting your company venture ready.  Some are direct hits on what to say and do–or NOT say or do–in an investor pitch.

The slides all use full-screen photographs.  But the text obscures half of the photograph in each slide.  So for that reason, don’t copy this style exactly as a model for your slides.

However, my guess is what you see here is a presentation deck that has been modified to work as a stand-alone deck on SlideShare and embedded in blogs (like BizClarity).  It is a model to be emulated if you imagine the slides without the blocks of text, with only the “Fail,” “Fix” graphics and headlines positioned in a dead portion of each photo,  and with the text delivered as a spoken narrative.

The photos themselves are a good example of how to do photo selection right.  The photo in each case expands on the meaning of the slide, and adds humor or drama without being coy or cliched.

Photo selection is never as easy as it looks.  It takes time, good hunting skills, and lots of trial and error.  But when you find just the right photo, you know it.  It pops off the screen, gets a chuckle from the audience, and gives a palpable boost to your narrative.  (That said, there are a couple photos in this deck I don’t think work well.  Can you guess which ones?)