Most entrepreneurs know they want to become an entrepreneur before they actually have a specific business idea. They have an inner desire to create, to build a product or a business out of nothing, to control their own destiny, to shape...
The other day I was speaking with a potential development customer when I realized two things: 1) He doesn’t need us … yet. 2) He can’t afford us … yet. “Yet” is a key addendum to both realizations. He has some interesting ideas, and a...
Entrepreneurs are everywhere. The development of the internet has made creating and selling a product or service more accessible to more people than ever before. New technologies are dropping development costs while marketing and...
I'm very excited next week to return to the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. Last year I was an Ignite speaker at the conference, and as I have said to many others since then, it was the best conference I've been to as both an...
Customer development interviews, focus groups, beta testing … they are all great ways to learn what your customers want before you actually build it. They are often based on small groups of people simply because it’s hard to interview...
We're excited to announce that our resident rockstar, Arin will be make a repeat appearance at the Lean Startup Conference. He's been asked to return to the conference, this time as mentor following his electrifying "Just Deploy It!"...
Last night I had the pleasure of attending Boston's Lean Startup Circle, titled "Sprinting Towards Innovation". Lead by C. Todd Lombardo the Principal Innovation Catalyst at Constant Contact, the evening was a very hands-on event that...
Agile methodologies in software development have been around for a long time. The Agile Manifesto was written almost 13 years ago in fact. Initially a hit with developers who were struggling to find a better way to build software, Agile...
Last weekend I attended Lean Startup Machine in Boston. It was a learning-packed 72 hours and I think all entrepreneurs should attend one. In addition to the hands-on exercises applying Lean Startup Methodologies, it was a great way to...
Eric Ries recently posted an article on LinkedIn called “Five Ways You May Be Failing Your Company (Or Making It Fail Itself)”. The takeaways were culled in-part from last year’s Lean Startup Conference. The article offers succinct,...
Last week I went to the Lean Start-up Meetup in Boston where Florian Motlik of Codeship lead a discussion with Amos Benninga from GrabCad, Dan Rowe from ETSY and Ken Eimer from InsightSquared on Continuous Deployment. The presentation was...
You got to know when to hold em.. We’re believers in Lean Startup here at AgilityFeat. In addition to our boutique UX/ Design and Software Development Services, we’re working on a few business ideas to scratch our collective...
Luxr.co has been providing great content for accelerators on Lean Startup methods for a while, and now they are launching a monthly subscription model that we can all use to access their content. This looks like a very exciting offering...
Simple business lessons from Cinco de Mayo, mint juleps and chinese food Eric Ries defines a startup as “a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty”. Here at AgilityFeat, we...
Back in November we sat down with Tony Cappeart, COO and Co-Founder at Contactually to talk about how they are applying Lean Startup methodologies to build their business. We talked about how Lean Startup had guided their product design,...
Do you have a question about agile, scrum, kanban, lean startups, or maybe just how the heck did I start a business in Costa Rica? I'm making myself available for some free consulting advice this week and next, and I'd be happy to give...
Last week Google Glass Mirror API was released causing huge waves of blog posts and opinions about the much anticipated Google Glass hardware. Google Glass has a huge potential. Nobody still knows if it would bring the revolution it...
Last weekend, I traveled to San José, Costa Rica to meet with the Agility Feat team. As usual, the trip to Costa Rica was absolutely amazing even though there were no beaches nor rain forests on the itinerary. This time, we used the...
Early in 2013, I was sitting on a beach in Costa Rica with the AgilityFeat team. Also with me was an author and visionary we hired to come work with our team for a couple days. That visionary was Patrick Vlaskovits, co-author of “The Lean...
Whether you are a bleeding edge startup or a large corporation running agile teams, here are four ways that you may be abusing agile concepts and letting perfection kill your chances of success. Product Owner Perfection In an agile team,...
In our first “news from the startup front” of 2013, our code commandos have a lot of great stories to share with you - and more coming! We've done interviews with 3 great lean startups (Twilio, LaunchBit, and Change.org), so please join...
AgilityFeat recently held a great event in Costa Rica called DareToBeLean, where we invited entrepreneurs to join us on the beach for workshops on lean startups and agility. As we were planning that event in the fall of 2012, I looked at...
My background is technical, not in sales. But as a lean entrepreneur, I have to wear my sales and marketing hat more than I wear my programmer hat these days. So I was excited when I could make it to this month’s DC Lean Startup Circle....
"Wave coming, wave coming ... paddle! paddle! paddle! Now stand up! Stand up! GET UP!" I can still hear the voice of my surf instructor, and those lessons provide a great parallel to the growth of my company and yours. Surfing and...
How do you convince engineers that it’s okay to build quick experiments, and deploy code that you will probably throw away? How do you convince rigorous engineers that it’s actually more efficient to work in a lean startup style? That is...