Venture Geek

At the STIRR PitchLab I spend a lot of time working with mostly first-time entrepreneurs to help them think about their business concepts and how best to articulate their visions. Probably the most common theme in those conversations is getting folks to go from product-based thinking to market-based thinking. In short, entrepreneurs in very new companies typically spend most of their time heads down building a product — it is very natural for them to think about the features of that product as the thing to talk about when describing what they are doing. But, more often than not such entrepreneurs spend far too much time talking about product features and far too little time talking about their business.

Ultimately, the product is a means to an end — building a great business. That doesn’t mean the product and its great features aren’t important, but history is filled with lots of great technologies/products that never made it over the hump to be great companies (and plenty of great companies are built, at least initially, on products that aren’t necessarily all that great from a features/technology standpoint).

But, that’s what this post is about.

At the last PitchLab, after close to an hour of discussion mostly on the theme of market-based vs. product-based thinking, the founder I was helping wanted to know where he could turn to go deeper. He wanted to know which books, which blogs, which podcasts, etc. were great resources for engineers who want to become entrepreneurs to turn to help them add market-based thinking to their repertoires. I should have had a better answer than I gave him. I suggested a book or two, and I could have come up with a couple decent blogs that sometimes cover such issues, but I ought to have a nice list of resources people can turn to, and I intend to create one.

So, know any good resources on helping entrepreneurs, especially those from engineering backgrounds, get some basics of how to approach customer segmentation, brand strategy, and market positioning?