I love the ingenuity and energy of Startups, and feel honored when my experience and insight contribute to their success.
Living here in the Startup Nation, and having spent a fulfilling career in hi-tech, I’ve helped many a startup improve their products and plans over the years – as a consultant to the many founders who sought my advice, as a MassChallenge mentor, as an advisor in Intel’s startup incubator and in its Corporate VC arm, as a resident UX expert in an Internet startup, and as a startup advisory board member.
Startups – the better ones, anyway – are incredible hot spots of ingenuity and skill; but evidently they can still benefit from the kind of insight and experience that can come from a long, varied career at the junction of innovative technology, user behavior and business practice.
Here is what I’ve been doing for them, and can do for you:
- Help improve and streamline your product’s design, notably in the areas of user experience and usage model. Many a product out there carry my imprint…
- Provide feedback to improve your business plan, product positioning and marketing strategy.
- Help you present the product to investors and customers.
- Provide guidance on adapting the product for enterprise use, and on how to get enterprises to actually buy it.
- Mentor, one on one, any CXO of your startup as they navigate their challenging role.
- Last but not least: whenever you brainstorm and discuss key matters, bring to the table a rich experience and a different, “outside” point of view. This turns out to be quite useful!
Valuable insight in an affordable package
Experience shows that startups usually prefer a bounded investment of both time and money. If you do, you should consider my $400 Startup Package. For this sum you get three things:
- Meeting #1: I will meet you or your team so you can share with me (confidentially, of course) anything you wish – materials, specifications, prototypes, demos, business plans and presentations that explain what it is that your product does or is intended to do, and how you plan to go about it.
- Detailed report: I will then take a couple of weeks to ponder what I’ve learned, test the product (if you allow it), and generate for you a written report encompassing my thinking about it all: pros, cons, improvement opportunities, features to add, features to remove, marketing approaches – insights that often lead the startup to make beneficial changes in product design or business plan, or to abandon directions that can undermine its success.
- Meeting #2: After you’ve had time to digest the report, we will hold a second “debriefing” meeting where you can question and discuss the ideas in the report.
Of course, every startup is different… Contact me to meet and discuss how I can help yours!
