Ash Maurya · Blog

AI can build your prototype in a weekend.

The Creator Economy turned audiences into income.

Features are needs and outcomes are wants, and customers care far more about their wants.

Two months of problem discovery interviews revealed that founders were not starving for frameworks.

The Demo-Sell-Build campaign from the inside: a concierge MVP, a demo of software that did not exist yet, and 40 days from zero to 209 customers.

Your 3-year goal is too far away to drive daily decisions, and your task list does not add up to a strategy.

An advisor once killed my business model in five minutes, nine months too late.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and I spent three years saying no.

When asked about competition, startup founders typically fall into two camps.

Most entrepreneurs start with a strong initial vision and a Plan A for realizing that vision.

At the early stages of a product, before problem/solution fit, customer interviews are the best (and fastest) way to learn from customers....

Ever had a customer go cold after a sizzling start?

There is no such thing as an impulse purchase.

Getting to product/market fit is considered the most significant milestone for a startup.

Time, like any resource, has multiple pulls.

The first battle for any product is getting noticed by customers.

The elevator pitch is one of four foundational pitches every founder should master.

Communicating defensibility against copycats and competition is critical when pitching your business model to investors and key stakeholders.

If you’re a product-oriented founder like me, you probably get a little nervous when you get to the pricing conversation during a product pitch.

When launching a new product under extreme uncertainty, it’s critical to prioritize tackling your riskiest assumptions first.

Like a good magic trick, most big ideas seem obvious in hindsight because they solved a customer struggle (or problem), that was seemingly sitting in plain view.

I spent the first couple of years as a solo founder wishing for more of everything.

Patterns are everywhere.

How do you get customers to openly talk to you during problem discovery interviews if you’re “not allowed” to pitch your solution?

Most founders set Product/Market Fit as their first significant milestone.

Entrepreneurs need to be able to simultaneously pitch a big long-term vision while staying grounded in short-term actions to move their vision forward.

The thinking goes that when launching a new product, it’s often a good idea to lower friction by giving away your product for free so you can 1️⃣ Learn from users 2️⃣ Get them to try before ...

Too many entrepreneurs prematurely rush to launch their product, join an incubator/accelerator, or hit the pitching circuit only to realize months (or years) later that they were chasing too small ...

You run an experiment every time you release a new feature, run a marketing campaign or try a new sales method.

As all B2B sales meetings went online during the pandemic, Matt Dixon and Ted McKenna, authors of _The Jolt...

What is the one thing that both investors and entrepreneurs care about?

Contrary to popular belief, an MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) is not a quick and dirty solution you throw over the fence at customers.

It’s easy to see the perils of going too broad with a new product: When you try to market to everyone, you reach no one.

Pricing is one of the riskiest assumptions on the Lean Canvas (Revenue Stream).

Both of them studied at the same university and got good grades, and after graduation, both worked at a high-tech startup where they quickly grew into key roles.

As products have gone from being delivered in a box to being delivered over the Internet, there’s been a dramatic shift in how customers consume, demand, and interact with products.

Twenty-three clauses on why you don’t need permission to start.

Bootstrapping an idea is more relevant today than ever, but the rules have changed.

A Lean Canvas is a 1-page business modeling tool that helps you deconstruct an idea into key assumptions or beliefs.

I often get asked why I created a different adaptation from the original Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder.

Me: You seem to have identified a big-enough customer problem that you have a plausible solution to (feasible)… What’s keeping you from closing customers?

Most entrepreneurs never bring up their true competition during a product pitch because either they

I recently declared that I’m moving away from MVP in favor of:

After 14 years, I'm abandoning the MVP.

If you were a marketer at a mattress company, when is the best time to run an infomercial?

When asked to do the smallest thing to learn from customers, the first instinct of many founders is to run a survey.

Cultivating a learning mindset is a key skill in any field.

Most entrepreneurs are understandably in a rush to get to the right side of the hockey-stick curve (aka scaling).

Moved to LEANFoundry.com I’ve moved this blog to https://leanfoundry.com/articles.

Customer Forces Stories are a powerful way of summarizing customer conversations during your search for problem/solution fit.