Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is about creating a new business where one did not exist before

competitive position How well you meet your customer’s top two priorities compared to any existing or likely competition, including the status quo for the customer.

measure would be click-through rates on the e-mails that were opened, the amount of money in sales that affiliates realized from the click-throughs, and the payments made to StyleUp for these sales. One might think that only the last of these three factors matters; but it is very valuable to know all three in order to provide a robust data set if the business model needs tweaking.

The goal is straightforward—make a list of all of your key assumptions, narrow your assumptions to the most important, put it/them into a product the customer can use, and see if they will buy it.

. The product is sufficient to start the customer feedback loop, where the customer can help you iterate toward an increasingly better product.

1. The customer gets value out of use of the product.
2. The customer pays for the product.

keeping the process moving quickly and efficiently

You can never take all the risk out of a startup but you want to decrease it as much as possible

To test the interest of lighthouse and linchpin customers, see if they will do any of the following:
Prepay for your solution (best)
Put down a deposit (good)
Provide a letter of intent (okay)
Agree to a pilot (acceptable)
Express a strong interest in purchasing if certain conditions are met (not too reassuring but may be acceptable)

With key assumptions identified, you will now design experiments to test these assumptions in the cheapest, quickest, and easiest ways possible. The goal is to gather empirical data that either supports or disproves your assumption