It's an old carpenter's proverb but it applies equally to modern business, especially if performance metrics are easy to measure. 

The other day I bumped into an acquaintance at CIC.. his legal services company was doing well and he said his next step was going to invest in a new website.

Why?

Now I'm a web technology guy and I'm always talking about how social media can be leveraged and optimized for almost every situation.. so he gave me a very perplexed look when I asked him why

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I mentioned this to a couple of entrepreneurs at the Unconference and was surprised they didn't use it..

I'm customer development metrics nut so I like to track how people get to my site, or how interested they are once they've met me. If you just put your website/blog link on your business card you'll get a bunch of "empty" direct hits on your home page.

Where did they really come from?

I have a pretty basic card that sums me.. "A Passionate Geek". It has my basics but a blank back which I personalize based on the focus of the event I'm attending and the people I want to engage.

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What's your background?

It's a very simple question but I bet the resulting advice is 95% accurate..

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Capture the passion and energy from MassTLC Innovation Unconference, feed it, grow it and keep it alive and we WILL change the world!!

Yesterday was an amazing event where 600+ entrepreneurs and experts gathered to share their passion for Innovation. It's an unconference so the sessions get built on the fly and organized into 35+ rooms with four time slots. There's also 100+ experts who volunteered to hold three One-on-One meetings with sponsored entrepreneurs..

Over 140+ sessions, 200+ expert meetings along with countless spontaneous discussions that exploded between 600 like minded innovators. It's a logistics nightmare and a mind-filling experience, don't drink coffee.. you won't need it!

The problem: Massive amounts of sessions, ideas and shared learning .. yet you can only be in a single place at one time

• Which session do I attend? How do I learn what happened in the other sessions I was interested in (but couldn't attend)?
• How to you capture the content and takeaways effectively, without wasting time searching/filtering though the noise in the webosphere?
• How do you grow the community, building the discussion beyond those physically present in each session?
• How do you continue the knowledge exchange of the unconference after the physical conference ends?

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I find it ironic that I haven't taken my own advice.. For the past year I have been advising entrepreneurs and small to medium businesses in the fine art of customer development. Have an idea, prototype or question, get it out there and give interested people the opportunity to engage. Build-Measure-Learn then Iterate.

About Me

I turn dreamers into doers and help develop ideas into successful products or prototypes. My specialty, I help people get unstuck and determine optimized Next Steps towards their goals with a focus on customer and product development, building rapid prototypes, coaching and playing devil's advocate or QA etc etc. I have 13 years of experience running startup and advanced development groups that did just that (as a manager/individual contributor). Then I sailed around the world for Six Years and built a support community with utilties to share/discover content through social media.

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This is a backdated summary post related to FutureM Customer Development Talk (Bob Dorf, Eric Ries) and Steve Blank's customer development theories that was organized by @simeons. It's was a great talk, great energy.. and well worth the time to review and understand. I still haven't captured all the nuggets and takeways from all my notes. Maybe you can help by highlighting the ones that resonate with you (I would use friendfeed to like a specific tweet).

Video, slides and archived tweets below

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Here is a list of startup related books that I have been collecting. I certainly haven't read them all but they have been recommended and/or discussed in various startup related blogs/sites.

You can also visit Next Step Labs Bookstore directly directly (on Amazon).

Note: This is an affiliate program. A small percentage of each sale goes to Next Step Labs, the prices you pay are identical to Amazon direct.

What are your favorite, most helpful books? Anything missing from the list?

One Simple Thing™ is all about helping brands achieve clarity of their message. Big decisions are made emotionally and it's biological.

At Anything Goes Labs we've been working on a similar simple solution rooted in founding intentions. To quote Bill Warner

I believe that we are often pushed to follow our head as we innovate, and I believe this takes us away from the true energy that drives innovation: the intention energy that comes from our heart... To help 'our people', the ones for whom we invent.

By focusing on timeless intentions and beliefs you also have the basis to explain your invention to anyone. People don't connect with specs or details.. we make our real connections at the Human level.

I went to the lab to help other entrepreneurs and it's been an amazing experience (more details to follow).

You can check out our uncut content direct from the lab via our Ag1Uncut blog.

 Activitystrea.ms is an extension to the Atom feed format to express what people are doing around the web, as Chris Messina was quoted in Louis Gray's "It aims to be the DNA of the Future Web",

We snack on information. It may feel like overload, but the tools haven't caught up. The solution to data overload is more metadata and we are at that point where can start generating that. We take the basic construct from 1999 and weave in some additional information - data about data.

It's based on a VERY simple concept of verbs, objects and types

• actor verb object (target)

and the extensions can be easily added to existing feeds to provide the extra meta data relevant to your actions around the web.. Chris posted an Article, Chris shared an Article etc.

Digging into Buzz

There's only one problem.. Buzz only talks about Buzz posts (Chris Posted a Buzz Note), when in reality I posted a blog on a connected site and shared it via Buzz. Ok verbs don't really matter but even the ActivityStream object points back to the Buzz post instead of the original post and the metadata for my actual activity and blog post is nowhere to be found. This connected site post appears as if I posted "Day 48 – Arrived! | Roz Savage, Ocean Rower" on Buzz (see feed). The full blog post text, a key feature within Buzz, is gone .. replaced by only the title, with no link, no summary and no attribution. Clicking on the syndicated link would bring users to Buzz instead of the original source.

So what is going on? As many of you know, I take more of a product manager/big picture point of view when I dig into (or develop) a new tool. I try to understand all the use cases (both user and developer) and analyze the options, inputs, and outputs to determine what data/resources are available to accomplish other goals (import, sharing, syndication, search, monitoring, etc). Specs, stated goals and visions are just words, implementation is what really matters to someone actually using the tool.

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