The Art of Landing Your First Customer with Brant Cooper
Brant Cooper is the CEO of Moves the Needle and the New York Times best-selling author of The Lean Entrepreneur, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, and The Lean Brand. He’s helped startups go from idea to IPO, acquisition, and rapid growth. But he also has first-hand experience with crushing failure.
Brant is a mentor and advisor to CEOs of some of the world's largest companies who are leading organizations out of the industrial age of business into a culture of entrepreneurial action. Brant's mission is to teach individuals economic and personal growth by creating value for others.
The lessons you can build from crushing failures
What is customer development?
"When there’s uncertainty, you can’t just execute"
Why don’t people talk to customers?
Scared
Too focused on the scale (i.e. do unscalable things)
Get out from behind your keyboard and talk to humans
“I need 1000 customers” - no you need ONE customer.
You don’t know enough about your business to automate your marketing
The REAL definition of product-market fit is that the market is PULLING the product from you, you “can’t keep it on the shelves”
How do you balance learning and deciding what to do with executing under extreme resource or time constraints?
What is customer empathy and how do you build it into your business?
How can you build experiments in your business?
What are the cornerstones of building good customer experiments?
What should you do if your experiments fail over and over again?
“The big opportunities are through thick walls"
What are learning metrics and how should you integrate them into your business?
Thank you so much for listening!
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Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research
General
Brant’s Website
Media
MSN Money - “Engineering the lean startup” by Chris Brummer and Evan Campbell
Crunchbase Profile - Brant Cooper
Entrepreneur - “Move Beyond Just Managing Into the Fertile Turf of Mentorship” by Brant Cooper
The Startup Garage - “14 Key Insights From The Lean Entrepreneur Author Brant Cooper”
Customer Think - Article Directory
Mind the Product - Article/Presentation Directory
LeanB2BBook - “An Exclusive Interview with Brant Cooper, Author of The Lean Entrepreneur – Part 1”
Forbes - “Lean Innovation: Design Thinking Meets Lean Startup For The Enterprise” by Kaan Turnali
About Me page
[Podcast] Edison 365 - Episode #3 – Interview with Brant Cooper – CEO at Moves the Needle
[Podcast] The Entrepreneur Way - 1668: Learning the Craft of Entrepreneurialism with Brant Cooper Co-Founder and Owner of Moves The Needle
[Podcast] EO Fire - John Lee Dumas Chats w/ Brant Cooper
[Podcast] The Foundation - The Myth of the Visionary - with Brant Cooper
[Podcast] The Innovation Engine - The Lean Entrepreneur, with Brant Cooper
Videos
Moves The Needle YouTube Channel
Talks at Google - The Lean Entrepreneur | Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits | Talks at Google
TEDxTalks - Myth of the VIsionary: Brant Cooper at TEDxAmericasFinestCity
Miguel B Hart - Leo Widrich of Buffer - Founder's Talk @ Outsite w/ Brant Cooper & Miguel B. Hart
Y6FM - A Beer with BRANT COOPER - author of "The LEAN Entrepreneur"
USD School of Business - Idea Lab: From Inspiration to Action Featuring Brant Cooper
Books
Lean Entrepreneur Book Site
Amazon Author Page
The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets by Brant Cooper , Patrick Vlaskovits , and Eric Ries
Entrepreneur's Guide To The Lean Brand: How Brand Innovation Transforms Organizations, Discovers New Value and Creates Passionate Customers by Jeremiah Gardner , @FAKEGRIMLOCK, and Brant Cooper
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Brant Cooper , Patrick Vlaskovits , and Steven Blank
Misc
Disruption for All Signup Form
[Book] Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. by Brené Brown
[Book] Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by Stanley Gen. McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, and Chris Fussell