Starting Up #18 - The Lockheed Training Course That Saved Me From Building the Wrong Thing

Episode notes

The number one reason startups fail isn't lack of funding. It isn't competition. It's building something nobody asked for. Founders fall in love with their own vision, spend months or years building exactly what they imagine the market needs, and then watch the market shrug. What if the single framework that prevents this didn't come from Silicon Valley at all, but from a manufacturing floor? In Episode 18 of Starting Up, host Jay Sensi opens the GROWING phase of the show with the most powerful tool he ever used: the Voice of the Customer. He traces it back to an unlikely source, the Lean and Six Sigma training he was required to complete as part of Lockheed Martin's operations leadership development program, and explains how a methodology built to eliminate waste on assembly lines became his secret weapon for designing software people actually wanted to buy. The principle sounds almost insultingly simple: the easiest way to make a customer happy is to ask them what they want and then deliver exactly that. Yet most founders skip it entirely, because of ego.

• Starting Up #19 - Map Your Customer's Process and the Product Builds Itself 63 / 100
• Starting Up #16 - How to Out-Specialize Competitors Who Own 80% of the Market65 / 100
• Starting Up #14 - Turn Every 'No' Into Your Competitive Advantage64 / 100
• Starting Up #13 - Why 'Yes' Is Killing Your Startup: Fake Validation Exposed64 / 100
• Starting Up #12 - The Cold Calls That Built My Company: Voice of the Customer63 / 100