This weekend I was coaching at Asheville Startup Weekend and noticed how many teams were relying on surveys as their “customer validation”.

While surveys can be useful during customer discovery to understand the problems of potential customers and how your idea might solve their problem, they don’t validate that you have a market. They only suggest that a market may exist for a solution like yours.

To validate a market, you must have potential customers give up something of value in exchange for the hope of your solution.

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Yesterday Seth Godin announced his 4th internship program. The aim: to change the world. Or, in his words, build something “useful, generous and powerful”.

If you have the time and the skills, you should apply.

Why Apply?

Everyone wants to work with Seth Godin. Here’s a guy whose written over a dozen books, started two companies and launched a handful of other successful projects. He’s had failures to give him wisdom and successes to give him confidence. Who wouldn’t want to work with him?

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Today I attended MassTLC’s “Crossing the Chasm – What has Changed in the Past Two Decades?”. At the event Geoffrey Moore spoke about what he’s learned in the past 20+ years since publishing the seminal book Crossing the Chasm, which taught how technologies get adopted and strategies for moving from early adopter customers into the mass market.

Below I mix my own remembrances from Crossing the Chasm with my notes from today. To learn more, definitely check out Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado and Geoffrey Moore’s more recent books on the subject.

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Yesterday I did a quick introduction to the Lean Startup methodology at the Asheville Lean Startup Circle. I focused on three key concepts: validated learning, minimum viable products and the build-measure-learn cycle. You can view my slides here.

If you’ve read Why Economic Developers Need Lean Startups or Lean Startup Conference Notes, you already know some  resources for learning about Lean Startup. Below I update this list to include resources I missed in those posts. Please add other resources I missed in the comments.
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The Lean Startup Conference happened today in San Francisco. Here in Asheville, we livestreamed the conference at Mojo Coworking. Below are my notes from some of the talks, links to other people’s notes and links to other Lean Startup resources. I’ll be expanding this post throughout the week, so check back later in the week or follow me on Twitter for updates.

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The theme of this year’s North Carolina Entrepreneur Summit is “Creating a Scene”. During today’s opening session, I asked myself how attendees could effectively create a scene.

One answer: template events.

Attendees for the summit include entrepreneurs, economic developers and government employees ranging from large, urban cities like Raleigh and Charlotte to small, rural communities like Cherokee and Chatham counties.

While larger cities may have the resources to plan, organize and host their own custom events, smaller cities can benefit from the trail blazed by others with template events. Even larger cities can find it valuable to tap into the network and resources of the communities that have grown up around these events. Continue reading >