Timan Rebel

Timan Rebel has over 20 years of experience as a startup founder and helps both independent and corporate startups find product/market fit. He has coached over 250+ startups in the past 12 years and is an expert in Lean Innovation and experiment design.
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Articles by Timan Rebel

Innovation Framework
The difference between the NEXT Canvas and the Business Model Canvas

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


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Innovation Framework
Using the Startup Studio model to structure Corporate Innovation Labs

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


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Portfolio Management
Portfolio management is a long-tail game

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?


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Innovation Ecosystem
How we co-create corporate startups

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. […]


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Innovation Ecosystem
The 24-month journey to product/market fit

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


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Lean Startup
Why we stopped building MVP’s

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


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Innovation Investments
The four criteria we select startups on

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 […]


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Innovation Investments
Invest with courage

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 […]


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Lean Startup
The Lean Sprint what is it?

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 […]


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Measuring Innovation Teams
A deep dive at getting Mixpanel right

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 […]


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Lean Innovation
Braintrust: a format for powerful peer-to-peer mentoring

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 […]


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Measuring Innovation Teams
The Early Adopter from an Analytics perspective

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 […]


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