The NEXT Canvas and the BMC are not mutually exclusive, but work well together as tools to create, test and renew ideas.

The topic of how to structure the perfect corporate innovation lab comes up regularly when talking to innovation managers.

When looking at the success of startups, a common belief is that one third of the companies fail, one third return their money and one third of the companies become successful enough to really move the needle on your investment portfolio. But is that true?

Creating and running startups as part of a corporate is hard. It’s because the whole organization of a corporate is heavily optimized on execution. And that is how it is supposed to be! Startups however are searching. Searching for a business model that works and can only start executing when they’ve found that working model. […]

How long does it usually take to go through all four phases and what type of investment fits every stage?

At NEXT we decided to drop the word MVP and use solution experiment, prototype, or first version instead.

At NEXT Amsterdam we believe in helping others. Not only startup founders but also our fellow (informal) investors. That is why we are sharing our knowledge and experience in a series of blog posts about how and why we invest. Two weeks ago we wrote about the investment thesis as the basis of every investment […]

This is Part 2 of our Investing series. There is often a lot of debate about choices investors make. “Why on earth did Investor X invest in Startup Y?” As an investor, you have to make bold choices. Every investment should have the potential to become really big, otherwise, you will never make up for […]

Most startups are familiar with agile development sprints of 1 or 2 weeks. They try to plan work that ‘belongs’ together and release a new version either at the end of the sprint or when the work is done. That structure works pretty well and helps to build a flow into your company. We used […]

Last weekend Diego Menchaca, founder of Teamscope and apparently also a big fan of our blog posts, proposed that I should write a blog post about Mixpanel. “Most blog posts tell what to track on Mixpanel, but it would be great to know what’s your approach when defining events and properties.” We love Mixpanel at […]

For three years in a row, the most valued session during the Rockstart Accelerator programs has been the Braintrust. Esther introduced it as Lean Mentor checkins, based on Salim Virani‘s Braintrust model, but it has slowly evolved in much more and is now a standard part of our proven Lean Startup curriculum. What is a […]

Yesterday we had the first introductory session with a potential portfolio company and tried once again to explain why it is so important to focus first on a clear early adopter. We often compare the early adopter with a person who fell of his bike (we’re from Amsterdam after all) and broke his arm. His […]