Launch Tomorrow

Landing Pages for your Lean Startup

Goal setting with creative boundaries

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Recently I appeared on the marketing mindset internet radio show. It’s hosted by Marie Mason and it airs at 6pm EST. There aren’t many shows that drill down into this really important connection. In fact, like my friend Rob Drummond likes to say with respect to small businesses: almost every business problem is often rooted in a personal one.

walkway
Photographer: Héctor J. Rivas | Source: Unsplash

We’ve had two weeks into the new year, so reality is starting to set in. I can’t say I am an expert in this topic, but on the show I do share what works for me. In particular, the focus was on boundary setting last year.

Setting good boundaries and holding yourself to them helps ensure you reach your goals, both personally and as an organization. I also think setting boundaries is intimately tied with a creative process and innovation, which we cover briefly.

chatting about boundaries

Have a listen and let me know what you think.

Also, my friend Rob Drummond (mentioned above) has a free kindle book offer until Sunday (Jan 17) night for his book Simple Story Selling. I love his work, as it results in bite size stories which we often already tell as founders or entrepreneurs. The approach really helps with writing emails. It also ties in really well to early-stage landing pages. In short, story is the best possible way to present new products to unaware audiences. Really, it’s a no brainer. Grab it, and read it when you have some time.

Let’s talk about risk

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Earlier this week, I was on the Yeukai Business Show talking about risk management in the context of startups. Yeukai was a great discussion partner, and pulled a lot of stories out of me. This is probably the more “storified” version of my work on risk management and experiments. As someone who spent 15+ years in financial markets and now almost 10 on innovation, I wanted to share the key learnings.

So if you want to learn how the foundations of identifying your biggest risks and being able to predict profitability and increase your confidence levels, pop over there and have a listen.

You'll discover:

  • The process of mitigating risk and cutting losses
  • The common reasons for loss and bankruptcy among tech startups
  • The impact of proper risk management, as well as 3 different ways to mitigate risk

If you want to find out more, check out Your First Startup Experiment to get even more tools and techniques on this topic.

What’s cookin’ for Launch Tomorrow

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This week I have a few updates to share. I think the main one is that it looks like my immediate family and I are recovering from covid-19. We don't really now how we got it, despite largely working from home in the last month or so. But in our case it kind of passed like a nasty flu and it seems to be kind of running in the background, too, even still. The testing took a long time, due to major spike in cases domestically here, so by the time I was certain we had it, the symptoms were disappearing.

I'm writing this to primarily just reassure everyone that this is a real thing, real people do get it, and there are varying levels of complications…so avoid it if you can. At the same time, I find it easier to have a more sanguine and less fear-tinged view of the pandemic, knowing how it ran its course in my personal context. It's not fun, especially in the early days of confirming you have it, as you know it can develop in any direction. But if you live, you have antibodies for this strain of the virus. If anyone wants to talk about having covid or dealing with it from a practical perspective, just drop me a line.

Fittingly, this week I appeared on the Working from Home show with Nelson Jordan. Nelson and I chatted about my experience managing remote teams before the pandemic. This is primarily in the context of working on the book called Align Remotely and helping to get the word out. The book is looking better and better and I want to release it officially in about a month.

visual workshops with remote innovation teams

Other than that, I have various facilitation sessions to help remote innovation teams deliver better and faster. I am starting to see that in many cases there is just not enough detail, particularly at the early stages, to be able to execute on a high level vision effectively. And that stops any efforts in their tracks. Such is the nature of the dreaded unknown unknowns. At the same time, the fastest way to start making progress is to go and deliberately explore them. If you'd like to get help with your riskiest assumptions or just to help your team identify the best way to spend their time, then give me a shout.

How to launch a new product in the market successfully

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This week my main update is that I had an appearance on the Startup Playground Podcast, as part of season 2 which he is calling the #CasualUndistancingTalks. The host Elvis (great name) and I had an in-depth chat. We mostly covered mindset about launching new products, and how to think about it, especially now during the pandemic. As well as the importance of teams and teamwork.

I had a lot of fun, and for some reason a lot of the examples were around mp3 players (remember those) and the launch of the original iPod. Makes sense, since we’re both podcasters. 🙂