Next month I’ll be speaking at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge Lean Startups Event. The event will take place on the campus of MIT at the Stata Center on February 24 at 6:30pm. More details can be found here.

I’ll be talking about our experiences running an agile product, customer and engineering process at Performable. The Boston Lean Startup Circle are having their monthly meetup later that same night if you’re feeling up for two startup events in one night.

If you’re a startuper or marketer in Boston I’d like to invite you to join us this week at Performable’s 3rd Customer Development Lunch, this Tuesday (January 26th, 2010) at 12:30pm.

We’ll be welcoming serial entrepreneur and fellow marketing metrics geek Dan Martell to Boston. Dan is a canadian entrepreneur now residing in Silicon Valley; he is the co-founder of FlowTown a social email discovery platform.

Our first Customer Development Lunch featured our Advisor, Sean Ellis, and was graciously hosted and sponsored by Spark Capital. Our second lunch featured Jonathan Mendez and was hosted by our friends at Compete and sponsored by Charles River Ventures. This lunch with Dan Martell will be hosted by our friends at TechStars Boston and sponsored by Performable.

Please register on EventBrite if you can attend this Tuesday: Customer Development Lunch with Dan Martell.

To the Ghostery Community,

Since starting Ghostery last year my goal has been to provide my fellow consumers with a free service built on the principles of transparency and consumer control. I am proud of the overwhelming response to Ghostery; over the past year, over 2 million people have installed Ghostery and joined our community.

Over the past months, as my focus switched to my new company, Performable, I made the decision that Ghostery should be in the hands of those who can give it the resources it needs to grow. I am happy to announce the sale of Ghostery to Better Advertising. Better Advertising is a company started by a team of privacy and online advertising veterans whose goal is to bring trust and transparency to the online advertising industry by working with companies, industry associations and the FTC to bring the best privacy and transparency to consumers.

Preserving Ghostery’s principles of user control and data collection transparency were paramount for me in making this decision. That is why, of all the options for Ghostery, including various offers for acquisition, a sale to Better Advertising was clearly the right choice. It gives me great peace of mind to know that I am leaving Ghostery in the right hands. They will not use any data collected from Ghostery for any type of advertising, a promise they make explicit in their Mission Statement and Privacy Center.

I have prepared a short Q&A to answer some questions that might come up in the near future:

1. Will the Ghostery service be interrupted?
   • No. While we’re transitioning over to Better Advertising’s infrastructure, we will do everything possible to make sure it is seamless.
2. Do I have to do anything or make any changes?
   • No. In the short term nothing is changing that would require you to do anything on your end.
3. Will my data be collected and used for advertising?
   • No. Better Advertising’s services are built from the ground up to specifically avoid collecting any type of data that could be used for behavioral advertising. Better Advertising also publicly pledges never to use any data it collects for advertising
4. What will Better Advertising do with Ghostery?
   • Better Advertising is committed to growing the Ghostery community by extending Ghostery across more Internet browser versions, and providing new services and features to our community.
5. Will the service remain free?
   • Yes. We don’t see making any changes to the service for the foreseeable future.

The Better Advertising team and I will be communicating more information in the coming weeks  and months. I will personally stay involved with Ghostery as I will remain an advisor to the Better Advertising team going forward. If you have any immediate comments or questions please send them to support [at] ghostery [dot] com.

Thank you all for your support. This has been an incredible experience!

If you’re a startuper or marketer in Boston I’d like to invite you to join us this week at our 2nd Customer Development Lunch, this Thursday (January 7th, 2010) at 12:30pm.

Our first Customer Development Lunch featured our Advisor, Sean Ellis, and was graciously hosted by Spark Capital. Our second lunch will feature Jonathan Mendez and will be hosted by our friends at Compete.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to announce that Jonathan Mendez has joined our Advisory Board at Performable. Jonathan was Founder & Chief Strategy Officer of the marketing services division of Offermatica, an A/B testing platform, which was acquired by Omniture in 2007. He is an online advertising and conversion optimization expert and a frequent speaker at online advertising events. We are pleased to have him as an Advisor.

At this week’s lunch Jonathan will be speaking about Landing Page Optimization and A/B Testing, two areas that we’re radically simplifying and integrating into the closed-loop marketing service we’re building at Performable.

Please register on EventBrite if you can attend this Thursday: Customer Development Lunch with Jonathan Mendez.

We’ve been so heads-down in the early days of my new startup, Performable, that we may have given the appearance of being in stealth mode. The truth is, we’ve actually been working closely with early customers, behind the scenes.

I do not like stealth mode. It usually means that a startup is off working in a bubble, receiving no customer feedback on their new product or service. This almost always ends poorly, with the startup finding out (too late) that no one cares about the product they’ve been spending (wasting) lots of time and money on.

What I’ve learned: If you’re starting a company you should spend every possible minute working with early customers and developing your product based on real customer feedback.

The best book I’ve read on this topic is Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany. Steve calls the process Customer Development and it’s his process we’ve been using at Performable. Steve’s book is required reading for every member of our team at Performable — including our Board of Directors, investors, and advisors.

Last week we launched our beta website, which describes what we’re building: A closed-loop marketing service.

Closed-loop marketing is built on the simple premise that you should listen to the feedback of customers who spend their valuable time learning about your company. Not only should you listen, but you should then adapt the way you communicate, and build your products based on that collective feedback. It’s very similar to to the Customer Development process that Steve Blank created; in some ways you could say we’re building a Customer Development Platform.

For the last few years, I have amassed a large list of services that I used at my previous companies, services such as: Website Analytics (Google Analytics, Clicky, Yahoo Web Analytics), Feedback Analytics (Uservoice, GetSatisfaction, etc), Email Newsletters (Constant Contact, MailChimp), Blogs (Wordpress, Tumblr), Social Networks (Twitter, Facebook), Sharing Services (Shareaholic, Flickr, Delicious), CRM (SalesForce, HighRise), Advertising (Google AdWords, StumbleUpon, Facebook Ads), A/B Testing (Website Optimizer, Offermatica, Genetify), and so on.

While each one of the above services is a great point solution, each also left me and my colleagues spending more time juggling tools and less time listening to and communicating with our customers. Even when we became agile users of these tools they never gave us a holistic view of our customers or activities.

This is the problem we’re trying to solve at Performable. We’re building a service that allows you to spend your time making sure your customers have great experiences with your company, and that you can simply and effectively measure and monitor those interactions.

Please let us know if you’d like to beta test our service.

I would like to welcome Sean Ellis to the Performable team. Sean joined our Board of Advisors last month.

Sean is well-known in the valley, running the successful consultancy 12in6 where he helps startups optimize their messaging and marketing campaigns. He also writes the fantastic Startup Marketing Blog and speaks regularly on the startup marketing world.

It’s been great working alongside Sean. Beyond being a phenomenal advisor he has been a very active alpha user of our marketing platform. We’re learning a lot about our early product versions and Sean is helping us eat our own dog food daily.

Here is Performable in Sean’s words:

“…Performable is creating a service that will make marketers’ lives much easier and empower them to dramatically improve marketing results. As an early user of this solution, I already can’t imagine how I ever lived without it.”

Our goal at Performable is to translate Sean’s early experience with our platform to anyone who starts using it. We’re excited about our future and are glad to have Sean on board!

To welcome Sean to Performable I am putting together an intimate lunch this week in Boston (Thursday, December 17th, 2009). A special thank you to my friends at Spark Capital, specifically Rob Go and Bijan Sabet, who have been nice enough to host the event at their offices.

Follow me on Twitter to snag an invite to the Sean Ellis lunch this week.

I was talking to my friend Evan this morning about a bunch of startup topics from office space (stay virtual as long as possible) to the best ways to communicate with your board. Evan is a serial startup CEO and offered me some great advice, he was even kind enough to blog about it since I was in my car at the time and couldn’t take any notes.

Here’s Evan’s quick tips for startup CEOs:

1) every friday have all your direct reports submit a “weekly update” one page or less focusing on progress against metrics, key accomplishments for the past week and summary of what’s on deck for the next week.

2) then aggregate/consoidate/summarize those updates, add ceo level stuff and forward to your board on sunday night.

why this apporach?

a) every team member should spend 30 minutes reflecting on the week. the key is that these updates are shared with other executives who are expected to read them prior to the team monday morning management meeting (another management tip). that way the meeting is productive focusing on issues and not “status updates”

b) by sending to board member’s on sunday nights you have a chance that they read it as your on top of their inbox when they are catching up on their weekend emails. Further, they are up to speed on your business during their monday internal meetings which makes them look good (and thus, you as ceo look good)

via Evan Schumacher’s World, Startup CEO – Quick Tips.

I’m a serial startup founder but this is my first time as a CEO & founder with Performable. I love learning so please pass along any and all advice.

My advice for those starting a new company: Stay virtual as long as possible.

One thing we did get right at Lookery was minimizing our infrastructure which let us focus our energy and cash on getting our product to market — fast.

We’re following a similar model at my new startup, Performable. So far there are three of us on the team, all working virtually. Unlike with Lookery, at Performable we all live reasonably close to each other so we meet at a local coffee shop several times a week to review our progress and co-work. The virtual setup works great for us since we knew each other previously, and we’re comfortable working together.

At some point we know that we’ll have to get an office space. You usually reach that point when you need to hire outside your personal network or grow beyond  a certain size, the exact size depending on your situation. When it’s time to move it out of your house or the coffee shop, you will know. It’s time to move out only when the the answer to the question “Is getting an office space going to help grow my business?” is a firm, “Yes.”

Back in 1996, when working for my first startup, finding office space was challenging; that was NYC (Silicon Alley) in the boom days, when everyone was paying a premium on huge loft spaces with room for ping-pong tables and Razor scooters.

Ten+ years later that all seems ridiculous; I’ve never witnessed a correlation between cool offices and successful companies. Today there are lots of options for startups: coworking spaces, part-time offices and shared workplaces; let someone else burn their cash on building out an office space (always a liability never an asset).

If you’re in Boston, check out my friend Coach Wei’s post on finding startup office space. But don’t sign on the dotted line until it’s a necessity. At the beginning, use the cash you’d be spending on rent to invest in things that grow your business.

If you like this post, please vote for it on my favorite news site. –David

Cover via Amazon

These are the 10 books that I believe every entrepreneur should read:

1. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law – LLC vs C-corp vs S-Corp? Founder’s vesting? Liquidation Preferences? Equity vs Debt financing? This book will educate you enough to be able to answer these and many other important questions.
2. Bootstrapping Your Business – From the founder of RightNow.  The amazing story of how a geographically-challenged (Montana) entrepreneur built a world class business.
3. Purple Cow – Dead simple premise, the key to marketing is to build something remarkable.
4. The Art of the Start – The Art of Pitching, Marketing and Funding your Startup.
5. The Innovator’s Dilemma – If your startup beats all the odds and becomes hugely successful prepare yourself for the innovator’s dilemma, cannibalize your product before someone else does.
6. The E-Myth Revisited - How-to create a business not a job.
7. Permission Marketing - The greatest marketing asset your startup can build is the permission to  market to your customers and prospects.
8. Growing a Business – Sincere advice for creating a company culture that your team and customers will love.
9. The Cluetrain Manifesto – Successful marketing is a conversation.
10. Bottom-up Marketing - Pure bottoms-up execution. Marketing tactics to grow your business.

And please don’t build your website without reading these books:

1. Always Be Testing
2. Designing for the Social Web
3. Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
4. Don’t Make Me Think
5. Call to Action

Do you have any favorites that I’ve missed?

Given my history I feel like I’ve seen every “It’s like Compete but for X” pitch.

So far I’ve only seen two of these that I found really compelling:

1. Next Big Sound – “Compete for Music” ( Thanks to @robhayes for the intro ).
2. GraphEdge – “Compete for your Social Graph”.

GraphEdge just went into beta and was created by Boston entrepreneur Waldron Faulkner. So far GraphEdge is restricted to Twitter but even at this stage its my favorite “Twitter Analytics” app.

Here’s one of my favorite features:

Go checkout both of these apps and please follow me on Twitter.