Startup Shop Talk: The Art of Getting Customers

We have a lot of fantastic programs for entrepreneurs in Sacramento. But not many are focused solely on collectively solving the mindset challenges that come with early-stage products.

To solve that need, two of Sacramento’s leading entrepreneurship educators are creating a new, free program to answer questions about innovation, entrepreneurship, the startup lifestyle, tools, techniques, and anything else startup-related.

Startup Shop Talk: The Art of Getting Customers is a new weekly, interactive livestream show entirely about startups & innovation — from idea to product-market fit. Hosted by Dan Casas-Murray of The Lean Innovator and Josh David Miller of The Right Box, the livestream is an open-ended forum where entrepreneurs can ask questions about innovation, entrepreneurship, the startup lifestyle, tools, techniques, and more, to startup advisors, investors, entrepreneurs, and their peers.

Startup Shop Talk is designed for entrepreneurs or corporate innovators working on any product that’s in the space between idea and product-market fit. Some topics will be straightforward (but interesting!) though others will be quite advanced. The hope is that they can meet the audience where they are, and get them to add value to the conversation, too.

Starting on Friday, December 17 at 11:00am, entrepreneurs will be able to join the discussion with Dan and Josh who will chat through a topic in an informal way, bringing in questions and comments from the audience as they arise. Occasionally, that will be workshop-like, but it will mostly just be fun conversations. After that, it’s an open forum for anything in the idea to product-market fit space. They’ll address comments and questions in real time, as they arise. Some of the topics Dan and Josh plan to cover in the coming weeks include:

• Traction is hard. Really hard.
• The art of getting customers before you have a product to sell them.
• Doing qualitative research with high quality surveys
• How should you fund your startup, and is venture capital always the right approach?
• The parable of the two horse butts, and how path dependency prevents innovation
• Surfacing, prioritizing, and testing assumptions
• The problem of the chicken or the egg – how to start a multi sided business.
• Two carpenters and the useless tree: how customer relationships are the secret sauce.
• Leverage “10X Scaling” to grow from zero customers to millions.
• The power of authentic community.
• And many more!

Each show will be a treasure trove of entrepreneurial gems. And, it will be a rip-roaring good time! Don’t miss out!

Tune in on Friday’s at 11:00am.

About Josh David Miller (JDM)

If you asked him directly, JDM would probably just say he’s a professional instigator, or he might tell tales of lessons learned through bitter failure, though he’s just as likely to offer a characteristically verbose description of the metacognition of entrepreneurship and innovation and how he uses that to help startups and other innovators. If you ask his friends, however, they will most likely describe his superpower as finding the right next question to ask to create focus, clarity, and potency.

More specifically, JDM is an entrepreneur and startup advisor who’s worked with more than a hundred entrepreneurs and corporate teams on hundreds of innovation projects. He is the founder of The Right Box, a bespoke consulting group of entrepreneurs, design thinkers, and fellow instigators who collaborate with innovative teams to unlock momentum by making the right decision right now, in order to launch and scale successful products.

JDM is also a facilitator, organizing or emceeing startup competitions, venture capital conferences, design sprints, and the assorted sundries of startup stuff — much of which is volunteer. He’s on the organizing committee for 1 Million Cups Sacramento, is a facilitator of Techstars Startup Weekend, and the host of the new Inside the Box podcast.

About Dan Casas-Murray

Dan’s been in the community since 2012, when the startup community was sprinkled around in different meetups, SARTA was in full motion, and there were innovation talks from time to time at Drexel University when it used to be on 1 Capitol Mall. The only coworking spaces around were Capsity, Hackerlab, and the Urban Hive.

Fast forward a decade, and Dan finds himself doing what he loves and gives him purpose: teaching other entrepreneurs how to find customers.

He writes, “I read the Business Model Canvas, Lean Startup, the Four Stages, all of those books when they came out. And I fell in love with the process, because I saw through the development of my own businesses, how the customers really were the driving force behind all of it. So I was all fired up to go out and try interviews, user testing, all that. Until I did try it and failed hard, because I had no customers for new projects.”

“So I went back to see if I missed anything. I was asking, ‘where are the customers?’ And nobody could tell me. The books said, build this for them, do these interviews, test these products on them in this way, and at the end of the day, I.had.no.one.to.ask. Which was really discouraging.”

“But I looked around and saw that a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs had this problem, too. So I started looking, trying things out, reading a little more, sharing what I found, experimenting with a couple of startup ideas, and finally had my answer: a group of processes that linked the Lean Startup, Agile, and Design Thinking methodologies together in a way that would yield a customer base way before founders had to start sinking money and other precious resources into their startups.”