Customer Discovery - Lean Startup Dojo (San Francisco, CA)

The Lean Startup Dojo is a weekly class focused on mastering the skills that you need to successfully build a Lean Startup.

Your startup won't succeed unless you have a deep understanding of your customers and the problem that you are trying to solve for them. Customer Discovery is the process that Lean Startups use to create this understanding. In this class, you will learn how to:

- find your first customers
- convince them to be interviewed by you
- determine if they'll buy your product
- get referrals to other customers

The Lean Startup Dojo places a strong emphasis on creativity and critical thinking. You will generate multiple approaches to solve each problem that your startup will face while executing Customer Discovery. The instructors and other attendees will assist you in analyzing each solution you propose through the lens of the Lean Startup philosophy. When you leave the class, you'll have a wealth of ideas that you can put to use in your startup.

This class will be taught by Rich Collins under the guidance of Eric Ries.

The cost is $100 per class.

via meetup.com

Seriously. This is the best bargain you can get. This class is so under-priced, it will address the skills that you need to get out and talk to customers, includes but not limited to: finding your first customers, convincing them to be interviewed by you, determining if they'll buy your product and getting referrals to other customers. The class is kept to under 10 people, so it will target your own problems.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Do Not Pretend That You Are Rich

• 86% of all luxury vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.

$16 what most millionaires pay for a haircut (including tip)

There are many words to describe how so many people end up in financial trouble, but one stands out.

Pretenders.

via washingtonpost.com

My haircut is a lil' bit more expensive, and probably this is what keeps me from being a millionaire. ;)

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Update iPhone 4.1 Jailbreakable & Unlockable

THIS GUIDE APPLIES TO IPHONE 4 ONLY.

How to Update iPhone 4 to iOS 4.1 Without Updating Baseband 1.59.00

Step 1

• Download TinyUmbrella 4.1.3
• Download iOS 4.1 for iPhone 4

Step 2

• Run TinyUmbrella
  ***READ THE README TinyUmbrella README NOW Yes. You Read it.
• Hit the Start TSS Server button

Step 3

• Now open the iTunes. Hold down the SHIFT (Windows) or Alt/Option (Mac) key and hit the Restore button on iTunes.
• Then browse and select your downloaded iOS 4.1 firmware

Step 4

• Let iTunes error with 1004 error (baseband update failed – we want this )

• No simply hit the Kick Device Out of Recovery button on TinyUmbrella.

That’s it. You have successfully updated iPhone 4 to 4.1 with 1.59.00 baseband.

via blancer.com

This is something I am going to try with either limera1n http://www.limera1n.com or greenpois0n http://greenpois0n.com. Why? Because I want to be able to finally call my friends' iPods with FaceTime by email. :) I want to keep my unlock with ultrasn0w http://ultrasn0w.com.

P.S. Fresh update - you can not do limera1n with ultrasn0w, so do either greenpois0n, which might also be not an option, if they incorporate limera1n's exploit, or DevTeam suggests to wait PwnageTool http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/1280823486/limera1n-surprise.>

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Groupon Going Wild

$35 for a 60-Minute Acupuncture and Massage Treatment at Elements Total Health Center in South Pasadena ($85 Value)

via groupon.com

Sounds like a heaven, right? One of the best rated massage salons (http://www.yelp.com/biz/elements-total-health-center-south-pasadena) in my area and $35 bucks sounds like a steal. What am I thinking of?! Buy!!

Lets do a quick calculus first. Still 2 hours left and there already 650 groupons are sold. Each of them is for exactly 1 hour treatment. Salon works for 61 hours a week. So they have at least one person who is already booked for more than 10 weeks in a row. And this person will get paid not more than $17.50/hour (as Groupon typically takes half of the deal). We are talking about quite an upscale salon ($85/hour is a regular rate, salon is well respected, so my wild guess would be that workers are paid fair enough). Of course, not everybody will come. I think 1/3rd will never bother. But we are still talking about 2 freaking months with 61 hours per week for some poor guy to be paid $17.50/month (and this offer is very generous - I'm assuming that the owner will cover all the maintenance loss out of his own pocket, as he wants to bring more clients - or am I fooling myself?)

So what do you think? Can you enjoy this offer in full or there is some major trap around (and it does not seem to matter much are you being trapped or the vendor)? Someone is getting royally screwed up.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: Envato

I think it’s interesting that we started with absolutely zero business experience. Three of us were designers, and my big brother was a physicist. This was good because we weren’t risk-averse, we didn’t really know just how much work we were in for, and sometimes we did things that someone with more experience simply might not have thought of doing. On the other hand it wasn’t so good when it came to building strong foundations for the company. Consequently over the course of Envato’s life, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time going back and laying better foundations for things which we simply didn’t know about. If we ever start another company in the future, we’ll know all about how to set it up right to begin with, but on the other hand I’m sure we’ll be a lot more wary of risk.

via 37signals.com

Such down to grounds idea, such a late time and such a success. Thumbs up!

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

Two Impacts of A/B Testing On Your SEO Efforts

...two major concerns:

• Content Cloaking: the act of showing different content to search engine bots and actual human visitors. A/B testing software (such as Visual Website Optimizer) swap content on the page using JavaScript, so some users see different content (of variations) and bots see original page only.
• Duplicate Content: the act of copying content from elsewhere and hosting it on your site. Search engines penalize for such stealing of content because you cannot expect to rank on keywords for the content that isn’t yours. Again, many A/B and multivariate testing software (including VWO) have an option where you can redirect site traffic to different variations of a page which raises this concern.

via visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

Properly done A/B and multivariate testing do not ruin your SEO investments. I have done numerous tests like that and analytics from search engines never pissed me off afterwards. (Triple knock on the wood though. Never say never. :)

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost