AUTHOR

Alex Westner


Innovation Award Finalist

Xander is proud to be a finalist in this year’s Eddies, formerly known as the New England Innovation Awards.

Pitching is storytelling

My current theory on pitching to investors is that you need to first tell a good story to get them engaged, and then you can get into the weeds of...

The Obstacle Is the Way

Being forced to deal with an obstacle has opened our eyes to new opportunities that will ultimately provide additional benefits at a lower cost.

What does “too expensive” mean?

Of the people who are passing, most cite the cost—that the product is just too expensive for them. But what does that really mean? What if we could...

ROI of higher fidelity testing

We’ve accumulated a wealth of information since our last round of testing a few months ago. The question now is: should we have been testing more...

Getting to the core IP

A few months ago I had conversations with experienced entrepreneurs and investors who challenged me on our approach to get a product to market using...

Customer-centric financial modeling

We got enough information from our last round of customer interviews that we could put together financial models of the business. We modeled unit...

Work backwards from customer priorities

Our last round of customer interviews gave us clear signals on what’s important to our customers. Now we’re going after how we can deliver on their...

Customer and solution ping-pong

As we continue to test and refine our product and our business with potential customers, we’ve found ourselves in a great cycle

Who Not How

As I look at my current list of business risks and technical risks to mitigate, I’m going to use an approach of finding the right Who’s to help me...