Category Archives: Customer Development

Customer Development, entrepreneurship, Events, Lean Startup, startup

NEXT Cologne is here again, starting October 23rd!

I’m stoked to announce it’s here again – We’re going for the third round of NEXT Cologne in STARTPLATZ!

NEXT Powered by Google for Entrepreneurs

For those of you who may not know, NEXT Powered by Google for Entrepreneurs is the premier experiential educational program teaching early stage startups how to build the skills and tactics your startup needs to prepare for an accelerator, investor, or early product launch, accessible at a nominal fee and on a schedule allowing for your day-job or studies in parallel.

NEXT is brought to you by the non-profit organization that also brings you Startup Weekends and Startup Digests – UP Global (recently mentioned by POTUS Obama) – and our partners include Steve Blank, TechStars and GAN – Global Accelerator Network.

It consists of a three hour evening meet-up, five times across six weeks, digital learning material with homework in between – and is adapted to people with day-jobs and university students.

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Customer Development, entrepreneurship, Lean Startup, startup

Customer Development on German National Radio

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Recently I was interviewed by Julia Fiedler at DRadio Wissen (Radio! Yes – it’s actually still around!) about what to do if you have a business idea an how to proceed. Should you start by writing a business plan? If you are copying an existing proven business model, say opening a new ice cream shop around the corner – maybe. If you want to create a new travel app that the world have never seen before, most probably not.

“No business plan ever survives first contact with customers!” – Steve Blank

Business Plans are guess-based works of fiction and what you want to be doing is to get from a guess-based fantasy to a fact based business as soon as possible.

So what should you do instead? In the radio interview I talk about the concepts and methodologies of Customer Development, Business Model Generation using the Business Model Canvas and building and testing Minimum Viable Products (MVP) – the minimum you need to build or create to start testing and measuring if the guesses about your product, customers and revenue model are correct.

Have a listen [in German] for yourself.

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corporate entrepreneurship, Customer Development, Education, entrepreneurship, innovation, startup

Introducing +Andersen & Associates

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People have been asking me what I’ve been up to in the last year and short answer is: I’ve been busy.

On the one hand busy supporting and nurturing the locals startup scene of Cologne grow and and teaching university students how to make their own mistakes instead of repeating my own mistakes when building a startup.

On the other hand, as a consequence of my experience with founding startups, working with corporations and teaching how to apply the scientific method to building startups at universities,   I’ve been receiving a lot of questions from my old corporate contacts. They’ve been asking me what they can learn from startups and which methodologies and processes they can use in their organization to create more innovation.  And the demand just kept on growing, so much so that I had to founded a new company to be able to serve the them.

Introducing +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES

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