The lean startup model has a huge emphasis on solving pain points. It is a customer centric model, where you go talk to the customer first, identify the biggest pain points and then offer a solution for that. While this is very helpful in de-risking your business in most cases, some businesses by default dont solve a pain point and yet see huge success.. take any gaming company for example. 

“How will you measure your life” is a wonderful book. 

Clayton Christensen (also the author of Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution) plays strong emphasis on context. Any solution / theory is of value only if the context is defined. If the context changes, the theory is not relevant and needs to be reformulated. 

Among other things in the book, there is a section on  building your career. And when you are looking for a role (or looking for someone to fill a role), the context is your experience. Your chances of success depends not on whether you have accomplished what the new role seeks to accomplish, but whether you have been in a situation similar to what the new role demands. 

Great article by Mark Suster:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/12/07/why-id-rather-err-on-the-side-of-direct-feedback-than-pleasantries/?utm_medium=bothsid.es-facebook-share&awesm=bothsid.es_q3D&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_content=awesm-publisher&utm_campaign=

My personal view is that feedback is good if it is directed at an object (presentation, company, pitch) but almost always useless if it directed at a person (you should to be more understanding, you should not be so lazy etc). Unless the person is willing to receive it, you can try all you want, the other person might even nod in agreement but it will be forgotten. People need a strong trigger to change and feedback is a lousy trigger.

A lot of times we have a feeling that something is wrong (with ourselves or with the group), but we cannot pinpoint what it is. 

The first step is ofcourse to recognize that feeling and make sure you dont ignore it. I ve found that my instincts are generally right on these things.. and very often things have blwon up because I didnt listen to these feelings.

Now I notice it more, and dont ignore, but if I cannot pinpoint what exactly is causing it, what do you do?

We were thinking of new names for our company because .com is taken for doctree and that doesn’t bode well for our global domination plans. WE have been sitting on this for a while, and I was suggesting a string of different names to promote discussion. They werent particularly good (I was Ok a couple of them but them I am generally less picky than the average person), and my cofounder was rightly rejecting them. But I was little miffed that he wasnt offering any suggestions either. That’s when I came across this article

I was reading the book “How will you measure your life” by Clayton Christensen, and he suggested a very neat model to what a person / company would make decisions.

The idea is that we have resources (money, skills, labour) and we use processes to convert them into products / solutions according to the priorities ingrained in us. To refer back to my post last week, processes and priorities are what maketh the company blueprint. 

A friend shared this quote with me and I thought it was quite profound!

Fact is, most of the world wont be able to see you if you stand on top of the tallest mountain in the world. Maybe noone will be able to see you. But if you look carefully, you can definitely see more of the world than you have ever seen before.

It was something that stuck to my head from the early days of jfdi. And i ve felt a need to remind myself of this every once in a while as It’s something easily forgotten in the rush to build a product and release it.

A company is a group of 3 or more people. The job scope of an entrepreneur is to build a framework or a blueprint which guides this company of people to run a business. And if the framework is built right, the company becomes scalable.

I have just started reading the Innovator’s Solution - and this was one of my big learnings from the first 3 chapters.

Taking the example of a cafe serving chocolate milkshake - the authors illustrate how focusing on the situation (When job does the chocolate milkshake product do for people and how can it do this job better?) rather than the customer (Who buys chocolate milkshake and what kind of milkshake do they like?) can make a big difference in how you target the product.

You must have heard of infinite scroll (http://pinterest.com/ , Google is a good example. See how there is no pagination). I always thought pagination was stupid when you could do something as cool as in infinite scroll.

Looks like Etsy did an A/B testing on infinite scroll.. So how it works is they roll out infinite scroll to a section of the users and stick to the old pagination for the rest of the users. And then they collect all kinds of relevant data like clicks, purchases etc of each user group and compare statistics to see if there is any significant difference in usage pattern.