How I use Reclaim to automatically make every day my ideal day — In 2019, I wrote about how I use a calendar template to balance my schedule and make sure I’m spending time on the things that matter. The basic idea of a calendar template is simple: Create a repeating schedule of calendar blocks that contain all the elements of a good…

Here’s how startup Great Question organizes customer feedback — A few weeks ago I was chatting with my friend Ned Dwyer, co-founder and CEO of Great Question. (They make an excellent all-in-one customer research platform that’s used by Brex, O’Reilly, MainStreet, and tons of other companies.) I’m always looking for better ways to capture and understand lessons from customer…

Here’s the 3-step process I use when helping startups evaluate and prioritize opportunities — Startups are super risky, never have enough time, and are obsessed with speed. As a result, the biggest question they face in any given moment is: “What should we do next?” At Character, I talk to startup founders every day. When the subject turns to prioritizing opportunities — essentially trying…

All startups have a product roadmap, but at the earliest stages, most of them don’t need one. That’s because a product roadmap is a plan for what you’ll build—but as a startup, you probably don’t know quite what you need to build. On the other hand, you probably know exactly…

How the best startup teams combine the discipline of craft with the mindset of invention — A few months ago, I read The Wright Brothers for the second time. It’s such a fun book, but what really struck me was the relationship between craft and invention in Wilbur and Orville’s story. To succeed as an innovator, like the Wright Brothers did so dramatically, you need to…

For the past 16 years, I have helped startup teams design new products and bring them to market. And through those experiences, I’ve come to believe that building the right product for the right people is the thing that matters most to startup founders. That’s why I’m so excited to…

The pursuit of innovation is inherently risky. Innovation is about creating value by doing new things, which implies a built-in risk that the new thing won’t work as well as the old thing. For me, this is a helpful connection to keep in mind when I’m evaluating or working with…

The other day I wrote that startups are learning machines, and shared some of the most common techniques I see startups using to learn. (Dave Ambrose reminded me of a great quote from Josh Kopelman, from his interview with Patrick OShaughnessy: “A startup’s job is to learn.” Yep!) That post…

The best early-stage startups are optimized for learning — about their customers, whether their product will work, how to get people to use it, etc. Oh sure, there’s plenty of other stuff that startups have to do. And like all businesses, they exist to create value for their shareholders, customers…