Customer Development Style Interview Script Templates

Two weeks into Lean Launchpad: Pioneer Valley and the greatest challenge facing our entrepreneurs is how to create and conduct Customer Development-style interviews.  Conducting tons of interviews, and doing them right  is at the core of the Lean Launchpad philosophy.  Steve Blank's books tell us the requirements of such an interview (does not bias the audience, gets us data that directly relates to hypothesis in our business model canvases, ect.) but it doesn't show us how  to do so.

For those of you struggling with the same issues, here are some resources we've assembled to help our students :

  1. Starting on slide 65 of this deck is a template that is specific on structure.
  2. An alternate, simpler template can be found here that gives sample questions.

 

Congrats to Click Teams Accepted Into Valley Venture Mentors

Congrats to Clickster Companies KnowledgeWare21 and EdgeFlip  for being accepted into Valley Venture Mentors (VVM)' Fall 2013 Cohort!  WHA WHO!  

VVM is the largest startup mentoring program west of Boston, itself growing more than 500% over the past year!  Competition to get into the program was fierce, with more than 70% of applicants declined.  Wow!  Way to go KnowledgeWare21 and EdgeFlip!

About the Clickster Companies:

KnowledgeWare21 (KW21) is a Northampton MA based educational management company whose platform is designed to handle the implementation of standards-based initiatives. Our software emphasizes a viable list of learning objectives aligned to the Common Core State Standards.  It allows teachers to assess student progress of those learning objectives and reports on progress to teachers, students, and parents.

EdgeFlip is a technology startup co-founded by analytics and big data experts from the Obama 2012 campaign.  Last year, members of the Edgeflip team designed and developed the \"Targeted Sharing\" progam, a Facebook-based product that was critical for reaching and engaging young voters and other hard-to-reach demographic groups.  By combining the Facebook \"social graph\" with voter data and predictive models, the campaign was able to turn more than a million online supporters into advocates.  The same team is now bringing and extended version of that technology to nonprofits, advocacy groups, and other socially responsible organizations. 

 

Funding Fridays: Debt Financing

Image Credit: Nusrin 2

Image Credit: Nusrin 2

Debt is the flavor of capital most of us are deceptively familiar with.  It is easy to draw the wrong conclusions from our experiences with credit cards and mortgages.  But when used correctly, debt is an invaluable tool for almost all startups.  Below are links to a lecture (broken up into 5-minute segments) where you can learn about the pros, cons, and best practices in securing this kind of funding for your startup.

  • Part I: Description, incentives
  • Part II: Process, pros, cons
  • Part III: Best practices

    • This post is a part of Funding Fridays, an occasional series on best practices in raising funding, as well as our collection on the Flavors Of Capital.