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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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Ardent 1: Supercomputers Get Personal

Steve Blank

Unlike Intel chips, MIPS chip architecture also made it possible to plug in a math co-processor. Some of the other founders had sold minicomputers to scientists and engineers, but no one knew or understood the unique class of applications and customers of supercomputers. We were going to be guessing.

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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# English oops: “You Know Your Getting Close to Your Customers When Your Offer Them a Job.”

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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on?

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Vertical Markets 2: Customer/Market Risk versus Invention Risk.

Steve Blank

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. For example, complex new semiconductor architectures, (i.e. What is your perspective on ‘sustainable technical differentiation’ for customer/market risk companies?

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Lessons Learned: What does a startup CTO actually do?

Startup Lessons Learned

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? That means knowing whats written and whats not, what the architecture can and cant support, and how long it would take to build something new. Thats more than just drawing architecture diagrams, though.

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SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Reply justingibbs , on May 11, 2009 at 11:29 am Said: Speaking of novelty, do you think Twitter could be the same? Reply steveblank , on May 11, 2009 at 4:07 pm Said: No. It was fun watching it happen.

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