Perspective: Building Products into Companies
A little perspective on this topic…
Build it and they will come? Sometimes… But design it for success from the outset, and you’ll increase your chances of building a company.
10 years ago, this workshop arose out of entrepreneurs feedback on what they struggled with. Understanding what it takes to go from building a good product to creating a great company. It struck a chord and 2.3 million people have viewed the original video and continue to give good feedback on it.
Recent feedback:
This is pure gold!! This is a masterclass on product building This is the most valuable startup business advice / “secrets”
Needless to say we thought it was time we updated the materials and examples and So I’m delighted to share the new version here, led by my partner Chris Gardner and produced by Claire Crowther and the awesome Harvard i Lab team.
As you watch the video Chris refers to some other key Startup Secrets workshops and you can link to those workshops on the left. But for ease of reference, the key Startup Secrets highlighted are linked below
Customer Value Proposition
4U
3D
BLAC and White
MVS - Minimum Viable Segment
- It’s so important we’ve highlighted it here
Beware: Don’t Overlook Your MVS - In combination with your MVP, it leads to your Minimum Repeatable Product (MRP)
- It’s so important we’ve highlighted it here
As time was limited Chris was only loosely able to touch on the notion of a 
Whole Product , which you can read more about here .
And if you want more examples and depth on this topic, here is the original workshop, with two great examples that led one recent viewer to share this.
“I’m an hour into this and only realized now that the video is about a decade old. Yet this information is 100% still relevant in this fast moving world”.
That’s thanks to the two great guest speakers:
- Gregg Favalora who is both humble enough to share what he learned from failure and smart enough to enable us to learn from him.
- John McEleney who highlights the fundamentals of company building with real world examples.
You be the judge of what still resonates for you…
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
A little background on why this session exists.
Startup Secrets started as a course to help people who have not had the chance to go through the experience of starting a business find out what it is like, and what some of the things are that you might want to think about. It is a program designed around the idea of having a framework rather than answers. The framework is a basis for you to investigate the right areas, and the case studies and examples we bring are meant to stimulate you to see what comes into practice when you are actually doing your own business.
As we built that framework, one thing kept coming up: people start, in many instances, with an idea or a product. A lot of you are in exactly that category. When you start with a product, and you have an idea about how you might build something, a lot of questions come up that are unique to you as a developer, or as a product designer, or as an entrepreneur trying to go after a new marketplace. This session specifically came out of the stream of consciousness of questions we kept getting from people trying to take that product and turn it into a company.
The thing I hear most from almost everybody I am trying to mentor is: “It’s all about the product.” And it may be. Certainly, if you think about what I hear from most entrepreneurs, it is “Apple just creates such amazing products, they’re going to fly off the shelf.” It is always Apple that people refer to. But building a great product is not the same thing as building a company, and the point of this whole session is the stuff that sits between them.
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