MacHeist has WriteRoom, Twitterrific, TinyGrab, Hordes of Orcs and ShoveBox for free for 4 more days . I think WriteRoom is a good app to try if you write a lot of stuff.

My favorite part of presenting the customer discovery process is a discussion of the attributes of listening that I got from Marshall Goldsmith’s “What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There“. This is a subset of the “Dating Skills for Engineers” presentation.

A big “Thank You” to Bill R for his presentation on the early days of the Saturn Development Group. Thanks Bill.

Listening Tips and applications of Customer Development

Here are some listening tips from Marshall@BusinessWeek

For those asking, “What does our investor pitch look like if we follow the customer development model?” Here is a great post, by the inventor of the Customer Development process, Steve Blank on Raising Money with Customer Development. I like his covering line

This is a radical departure from a traditional VC pitch. It will blow the minds of 70-80% of investors. The others will throw you out of their office.

The first reading always inspires me. It’s a Babson College study that concludes

“… there is no compelling reason to write a detailed business plan before opening a new business.”

Do Business Plans Make No Difference In The Real World? A Study Of 117 New Ventures — enjoy.

tip to Steve Blank for introducing me to this reading

There are so many good quips. I’m particularly liking … “He (Elmsworth) may be lord of the manor, but she ( his sister Connie) has revisionary powers over his decision making”

I love PG Wodehouse’s comic capers. I’m currently in LOL mode with Uncle Fred in the Springtime. Uncle Fred is an amazing character. He brings a whole new dimension to the Blandings Series character set.

A few days ago I posted some tidbits on Google making up 6% of internet traffic.

If you want all the gory details. Telco 2.0 guys have it here Latest Internet traffic stats: Google and CDNs outmuscle Tier 1 Telcos

I like the contrast of declining “Revenue from Internet Transit Slide” with the increasing “Revenue from Internet Advertising”

Reminds me that this diagram still has meaning when analyzing opportunities in networking.

“The END of the WORLD came & went while you were on FACEBOOK” » Bizarro Oct 16, 2009

I love Glee. This week’s Bust A Move was great. I’m gonna have to break out my old vinyl. Yes, I was one of those people who bought the big single and played it to death

It’s here on youtube

Yesterday’s Marketing Supports Sales post reminded me of an old Marketing Connects rant I posted a while back.

The key point is that marketing people get the ball rolling, and keep the ball rolling so that “others can finish”. Marketing people fail if they decide/want to be the star. Their success is directly proportional to how big a star they make of others.

It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales. … “Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick.” » Steve Blank The Sharp End of the Stick

This is a very good “what does marketing do” post. It gets right to the heart of “Marketing vs Sales” politics/wars. The two biggest egos in the room are not gonna work it out amongst themselves. It’s got to be defined up front. Sales is the most important thing. End of story.

I’ve updated the Fizz page so that none of the links are dead.

Changes

• The biggest change is that Marc Andreesen took his posts offline. Luckily the archives are available at http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/
• Good news Steve Blank now has a blog
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