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Showing posts from June, 2017

7 Challenges That Will Make You More Successful

Maintaining the success mindset isn’t easy. There are seven things, in particular, that tend to shatter it. These challenges drag people down because they appear to be barriers that cannot be overcome. Not so for successful people, as these challenges never hold them back. 1. Age Age really is just a number. Successful people don’t let their age define who they are and what they are capable of. Just ask Betty White or any young, thriving entrepreneur. I remember a professor in graduate school who told our class that we were all too young and inexperienced to do consulting work. He said we had to go work for another company for several years before we could hope to succeed as independent consultants. I was the youngest person in the class, and I sat there doing work for my consulting clients while he droned on. Without fail, people feel compelled to tell you what you should and shouldn’t do because of your age. Don’t listen to them. Successful people certainly don’t. T

Identify Target Customers with User Personas

Step 1: Brainstorm Personas First, understand the "supply chain" of your product space, that is, what are all the roles involved in delivering the product or service you imagine. Think in terms of end users, resellers, advocates, partners, policy influencers, and internal users. You might have multiple candidates for each of these categories. For example, say you are targeting the education market. You might consider personas for students, teachers, administrators, parents, tutors, librarians, or school IT personnel. At the next level, you may consider parents who are technically savvy and those who are not, those who have lots of time and those who do not, and students who have different learning styles, different interests, and different motivators. These would all be personas you could create. Step 2: Research and Interview Now that you have your prospective list, you'll want to go out and interview people who fit these descriptions. H

6 Steps to Make a Successful Product Guaranteed

Discover details of your customers' unmet needs. You should develop a set of interview questions, meet with these suffering customers in the environment where they’re suffering, and listen to what they say when you ask them the questions. Through this listening, you must discover more details about the nature of their pain--and try to assess what kind of product would encourage them to become customers. Develop hypotheses. Using the observations of customer needs and your vision of the technology, you should make educated guesses about the most important product features likely to lead to wide customer adoption. Moreover, you should make a numeric estimate of the number of customers you thinks will use a prototype with those features. Build a prototype solution. The next step is to develop a quick and inexpensive prototype with those features. The first version is not likely to meet the customer’s unmet need but it should help you get a better u

4 Steps To Overcoming Failure

1. ACCEPT THAT FAILURE IS PART OF THE PROCESS When times get tough, one of the most frustrating things we can hear from someone is to “stay positive.” The concept of positive thinking has been misused, misconstrued, and abused by us all. Despite what we hear, it has nothing to do with smiling and being happy with everything that happens to you. Anyone who says that is either lying or crazy. Positive thinking, rather, is used so that we can learn, grow, and evolve from what we experience in life. This does not mean try to fail. It simply means that if you are faced with a setback, understand it is not your final destination. It is a stepping-stone in your journey that is getting you to where you need to be. When we do experience difficulties in life, it is okay to get down on ourselves. It is okay to get upset and disappointed. Our goal however is to not stay down. 2. LET OUT YOUR FRUSTRATION Once you have taken some time to walk it off and clear your