5 leadership takeaways to remind me that true change starts with me.
After a weird conversation with the first user utilizing our web chat support tool, I reflected and concluded with some thoughts to remind myself of the influence we have with others and how important it is to lead by example. I’ve decided to share them as I thought it might be valuable for some readers.
To provide you with the full context, I’m sharing the full transcript of the conversation. The parenthesis words are my comments to clarify the context for you:
User: what does this cost? (to join our community)
Me> Hi there! This is Jose
Me> It is FREE
User: How do you pay for food?
Me> I do not understand your question.
Me> What food are you talking about?
User: what is your business model, you are listing a bunch of meetings on IH I am trying to determine how you make money (referring to revenue model instead of the business model)
User: I’ll be happy to answer you in one of our calls ;)
Me> Even on a 1:1 meeting if you want
User: there is never any charge?
User: how do you personally make money? Are you nigerian prince?
Me> We are building our Minium Viable Community
Me> Once we have this we’ll start charging
User: what does that mean?
User: Ah, so I am the product
Me> We’re building a community of early-stage tech founders to help them develop their ventures thanks to a better understanding of startup methods and best practices with mentors and P2P advice
User: how do you personally make money now?
Me> I’m sorry but that is none of your business ;)
User: Perhaps but it bears on your ultimate motivation.
Me> If you are interested in our FREE help I’ll be very happy to help you, and the other mentors too
Me> It depends on the kind of motivation as human being you have
user: When they say “It is Free” ask Who is Paying? Lee Kuan Yew
Me> There are 3 kinds (of human motivations)
Me> one is about money
Me> but not the other 2
Me> I can explain to you about human motivations in our calls
User: clearly you are a very private person and I have asked an embarrassing question. I will keep your group in mind for future use.
Me> Perfect. Thanks for your consideration! …
Key Takeways of a talk about innovation adoption with Warren Schirtzinger, cocreator of the “Chasm” framework
Last Thursday, I was lucky to interview Warren Schirtzinger during a live webinar, one of the co-creators of the “Chasm” framework in the 80s, later polished and popularized by Geoffrey Moore in the book “Crossing the Chasm”.
During the interview, Warren explained clearly how people’s behavior affects our innovations and new product adoption. He provided valuable tips to help us grow with our innovations, crossing the famous “Chasm”. Keep reading for an introduction to the “Chasm” and the key takeaways of the interview.
Most people in this poll think that we buy technology instead of buying progress. I’ll show you why this approach does not help innovation.
I’ve launched a Twitter poll to see what people think is the best approach while developing new products/services. The poll has been featured among people with startup or entrepreneurial interests.
After looking at the results, I was surprised. To be honest, I was expecting a 65–70% for the “people buy progress” approach. So far from the results! Right now, it’s 47% for “people buy progress”.
After reflecting on it, I’ve come to two potential reasons for these results. On the one hand, probably not everybody understands what do I really mean with the question. …
Step by step guide from the problem statement to building a no-code MVP app to test a new product in the market: frameworks, tools, time spent and costs.
It has been almost one month since I started working in GrowthSeeker.io project, a virtual startup incubator that focuses on generate custom content for the problems of our entrepreneurs in order to accelerate their product-market fit.
In this article, I’ll share the process and tools I’ve used to go from problem to MVP test in just two days and 0 dollars for an entry-level tool for my new venture.
1. The hypothetic problem to solve + the target market
While thinking about the different customer segments and the different problems to solve, we hypothesized the next Job-To-Be-Done to solve for early or technical entrepreneurs, and SMB managers without experience/education in innovation, strategy, and…
How I resurrected my Twitter account after almost three years and managed to grow followers 18% in one month
It all started on November 19th, 2019, with the purpose of help others sharing experiences, reflections, and thoughts on Medium. After publishing some blog posts, I decided to push a little bit more for readers on Twitter and learn on the experiments to apply what best works to my company.
My Twitter account has been dead for almost three years, so I did some experiments to resurrect it and grow Twitter followers based on the readings of other blog posts and experts. Let’s explore what I tried, and the results observed during this month:
1. Design a Brand Strategy (Personal or for Your Company) and Tweet Content Related to It
No matter if your Twitter account represents you or your company, the audience you cultivate will be connected to the topics you talk about. Those topics should be related to the purpose and the goals of the brand you are representing at Twitter. There are plenty of accounts that I am sure that do not know about it, but they do it unconsciously. …
A personal story translated into 6 key takeaways for startups and product development
During the past vacation period, my partner and I reflected on what happened to us during the hotel checkout, and how hard it is to unveil the real Jobs-To-Be-Done the people are trying to do.
It was Jan 26th at Maui Kaanapali Villas, Hawaii. That day we had to take the flight back to Seattle at 11:20 PM, so we had plenty of time to relax and enjoy our last day at Maui. Under that circumstance, we were discussing the convenience of doing a late check-out at the hotel at 1 PM instead of the standard check-out at 11 AM. …
Questions and misconceptions about disruption theory are arising. What really matters is progress and to whom you are bringing your innovations.
Ultimately, I am facing multiple questions about what is or what is not disruptive in sites like Quora, and reading posts with misconceptions about disruptive innovation. I love to think about all of those questions and opinions. They help me to keep reflecting, and asking questions, to understand and keep learning. Besides, I admit that at some point, the original disruption theory of Dr. Clayton Christensen could be hard to apply or may not even be applicable.
My point with this controversy is that we may be losing the purpose of innovation, which in my view, is to bring progress to humans, helping us all to improve the way we perform our Jobs-to-be-Done while looking for economic efficiencies. …
…and what to do to implement strategic initiatives not matching your corporate culture
Culture eats strategy for breakfast — Peter Drucker
This quote to Peter Drucker, commonly considered as the father of management, briefly summarizes the power of culture in all the elements composing a company. If culture eats strategy, it can eat whatever it wants.
But what is corporate culture? I would define it as the set of behaviors, values, and beliefs predominant on how the people of a company make decisions and interact with their workmates, industry peers, and market environment. If you want to deepen the cultural elements, I strongly recommend this HBR article describing the six components of culture.
Culture is the very first, and the central element of the drivers for growth in the companies. The other factors strongly depended on this one. …
This process helps to serve your team member’s motivations and build trustworthy relationships based on the empathy and understanding of the human motivating forces.
Lead a team is a difficult task. Leadership requires a huge amount of skills, starting by managing oneself, having the right intentions or demonstrated knowledge relative to the job position we are developing. Understanding human motivation forces, empathizing and genuinely acting to serve our team member’s motivations will humanize our leadership style. In the next sections, we will explore a process that helped me in this humanizing process, understanding and serving my team's motivations as a driver to build mutual trust.
1 — Understand the motivations
Every one of us has a different life purpose, motivations, and goals that drive where we spend our time. Or at least should drive it if we want to have good mental health and be fulfilled with the life we are living. Motivations move humans to behave and put their time on specific jobs to do in their day to day tasks. …
Why is this new entrant selling more cars than incumbents in the USA? Here I share some good practices from a Jobs-To-Be-Done perspective to help us build and grow our businesses.
Tesla’s automotive business is usually described as a disruptor in the automotive industry. In a future article, I’ll explain why it is not according to disruption theory. However, Tesla is doing a great job comparing the sales against historically well-established brands in the high-end market like Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Lexus, or Infinity, in an industry with a very complicated business model.
The theory of disruption suggests that Tesla would have low odds of growing the business because it can be imitated by incumbents and built on top of their actuals business models. …
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