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Be Your First Customer: Why Beta Testing Is Right for You

YoungUpstarts

It seems like almost all technology goes to market with a “beta” tag attached. After all, Gmail wasn’t taken out of beta until 2009 — five years after it was originally released. Automated testing assesses the designed boundaries of your product. by Sam Bahreini, co-founder and COO of VoloForce.

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Sales and Marketing Misalignment Is Costly—But Avoidable

ConversionXL

Sales and marketing misalignment reduces revenue, lowers the quality of customer service, and can even dampen company culture. Of course, it isn’t just your sales team that suffers. Marketing often works hard on positioning and other marketing initiatives that the sales team undervalues. So how do you get aligned?

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Lessons Learned: Work in small batches

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

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Is This Ex-Googler’s Pre-Product Approach the Fast Track to Product-Market Fit?

View from Seed

Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” Starting in 2009, Savoia began using an approach as an engineering director at Google that helped the tech giant know whether it was about to build the right product for the market … or a product that would flop.

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Startup Advice: When to Use a Consulting CTO

rapidrollout.wordpress.com

Investors use a consulting CTO for technical due diligence. And his previous startup failures may have been the result of non-technical business issues like failure to find funding or missed market timing.) third party to vet or manage&# your development team. Why are consulting CTOs so scarce? Try Google.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." Theory of market types.

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Lessons Learned: The product manager's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

But I have a special sympathy for the "product manager" in a startup that is bringing a new product to a new market, and doing their work in large batches. I met one recently that is working on a really innovative product, and the stories I heard from their development team made me want to cringe.