Notes on The Permanent Tomorrow with Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper

My friend Patrick Vlaskovits, author of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development, gave a talk recently with his co-author, Brant Cooper, about "The Permanent Tomorrow." He's given this talk in a few places, and I caught him down in Orange County last week.

In the talk, Brant and Patrick discussed a lot of the big trends happening in the tech, manufacturing, and service industries, and how entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) can best take advantage of them.

They have a new book coming out very soon called The Lean Entrepreneur, for people who have "already bought into Lean Startup, Customer Development, Design Thinking and other iterative, customer-centric methods of product development [and] want to know how to apply these to their business." Sounds awesome -- can't wait for it come out.

I think Patrick and Brant hit on the big trends pretty succinctly. I'm personally excited about the potential for many of these changes once a critical mass of designers and developers gets fluent enough at them to really make substantial moves forward. I'm personally interested in innovation in areas that improve people's lives in fundamental ways and are not purely informational in nature.

Below are some of my notes on their talk.

I.               Disruptive wave is building
a.     Smartphones
b.     Online edu
c.      3D printing

d.     crowdfunding
i.     cultural technology

II.             Gilded Age
a.     railroads, telegraphs were disruptive

III.           Future wave: volatile, uncertain, opportunity

IV.            Frictionless economy
a.     new entrepreneurs creating new value for new customers

V.              Lean entrepreneurs surf uncertainty

VI.            Innovation spectrum
a.     sustaining innovation
b.     re-segmented low cost
c.      re-segmented niche
d.     rippling innovation
e.     disruptive innovation

VII.          Customer interaction and segmentation
a.     Betabrands

VIII.        Viability testing
a.     build prototype to allow others to have experience
b.     Litmotors
c.      Olloclip

IX.            Data and actionable metrics
a.     Kissmetrics
b.     intuit

i.     horizon planning (entrepreneurship in big organization)

1.     horizon 1: current products, execution, known
2.     horizon 2: startups proven that they’ve got something
a.     now need to figure out biz model

3.     horizon 3: a bunch of little startups that are experiments inside larger org

a.     marketing issues: release under separate domain/”labs”/brand

b.     legal issues: allow entrepreneurs to do whatever want as long as follow guidelines legal prescribed ahead of time so don’t need to get approval each time

c.      HR/cultural issues: allow ppl to spend part-time on cooler H3 projects alogn with H1 projects

ii.     use metrics to go between phases

iii.     how to take customers from satisfied to passionate

1.     charity/cause marketing
2.     packaging
3.     great UX

iv.     Love metric/NPS/must-have score
1.     If 40% of ppl would be very disappointed if product went away, then you have passionate customers

X.              Fishing analogy
a.     if you’re going to go fishing, use different techniques for different customers

i.     instead of trying too many gadgets/value props at once, try one at a time in earnest

b.     Anti-segments: hooking the wrong type of customer

i.     qualify people out

XI.            Market segmentation
a.     demographics less useful
b.     "Jobs to be done" model

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