Glad you enjoyed the post, comments like that encourage people to write.

Cheers

First and foremost, I’m digging your blog, it’s getting me to think from a unique perspective.

What do you actually think of the notion from Steve Jobs you mention above. Essentially that people don’t really know what they want until you give it to them. This is the nearly the same notion from Malcolm Gladwell’s TEDtalk on Spaghetti Sauce.

Or something to that effect? Does it make too much validation useless?

I think #1 is actually the best, for validation, so I’m glad you put it at the top. I’m surprised to see #7 way down at the bottom though, I think this is a critical factor for success in anything you do.

Do you eat your own dog food? If you created a tool that only you used, or could use and find a way to make money using that tool regardless of what other people adopt, could it not still be a success?

I agree with you 100% on #6 too.

#2 seems like a way to collect data, but I’m not sure it’s meaningful or reliable data, especially as it is known that people fib on surveys a little bit.

#3 adwords is a cheap way to validate words, but until people know what your product is and what it does, I’m not sure it buys you a lot of real estate. You may as well use Google’s Keyword Tool for free and see what gets searched frequently to validate your idea. I feel like Unbounce and A/B testing in general seems like a way to validate version 0.9 before public launch, or to tweak something to see what converts better.

What are your thoughts on video production as an MVP, ala Dropbox?

Also I’m going to lay another book recommendation down for start-ups, it may not make a ton of sense right now, but I think the most successful world-wide brands stem from a belief structure. It may give you a good place to start from.

Apple may not have happened did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak not have a strong sense of purpose in creating the company, as it was not any one product or service they built alone, that was responsible for the company’s success.

Unfortunately I feel like there are lot of people in the start-up world, building start-ups without any real passion behind the idea, other than they think they can make money doing it. Ideas are great, but having a strong feeling that you have to make it happen and execute on it, is another thing entirely. I wonder if making money alone is the right reason to start a start-up?

Anyways, the book is, “Start With Why.” I think you may enjoy it.

These are wonderful criteria to consider when executing an idea. Personally I feel the #7 (use it yourself) is very important. The world is full of products and services that the creator or producers wouldn’t want to use themselves. How one can expect others to use it if himself wouldn’t want to use it?

It was quite the opposite, I was actually thinking how crafty I was to distill all the possible competitive advantages into two points

Clearly after the Smart Bear read and your notes above there is more to it than I originally thought! All great points and I updated that section of the read to point to your shared link.

Thanks for the input

I noticed that for “5 Competitive Advantage” you looked a bit like you were struggling. This is one thing I’ve had issues with in the past and I found this article shed some interesting perspective on it: http://blog.asmartbear.com/unfair-advantages.html

For example, being obsessed with solving a particular problem in a particular way can be a competitive advantage (presuming the market likes it) – this is something you can iterate and learn and not necessarily an entrance criteria.

Glad to see you enjoyed the read. I will endeavor to write more, it just takes me way too long to push out something I am happy with

Talk soon

Thank you for putting all of this together. I certainly have gathered some good ideas for my own activities from this note.

Please keep publishing/contributing.

I must admit, it was really clever of Apple to just add a phone onto their iPod… that was simple, yet genius.

But, they’re repeating the same mistake as they did long ago. Back in my elementary school days, Apple Macintosh was the computer of choice for schools (beautiful GUI), but then PCs started to take over for some reason. And that was it, by high school, nobody used Apple computers. Apple had failed precisely because they didn’t let third-party companies clone their computers, whereas IBM did. It seems they’re making the exact same mistake as in the past.

Going back to Twitter and Roman’s point… well, when you’re at some TED event, and half the room is tweeting what they’re hearing… is that really a productive use of the tweeter’s time? Would I not rather be enjoying my vacation, instead of taking pictures and video of everything and missing the vacation itself?

Jesse, what you speak of in your article is precisely the reason that although the web is chock-full of information, we haven’t seen the death of news organizations, magazines, TV, or movies. We will always need professionals to sort through the noise and give us concise, relevant information, and present it in the proper format.

Ummm… in the end… all these social networks will be super-ceded by something that is not exclusive in membership.