Remove Acquisition Remove Customer Development Remove Engineer Remove Founder
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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) release of the product.

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Why Real Learning is Outside the Building, Not Demo Day

Steve Blank

While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of our class final presentations is “ Lessons Learned ” – about product/market fit, pricing, acquisition/activation costs, pricing, partners, etc. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders. Technology in search of a market.

Lean 315
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See More than 120 Speakers and Mentors at The Lean Startup Conference

Startup Lessons Learned

For example: Mitch Kapor was a founder of Lotus. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. He was a very early employee of Facebook , and engineering director there through the moment it blew up. Eric Ries will interview him.

Lean 165
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Nokia as “He Who Must Not Be Named” and the Helsinki Spring

Steve Blank

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Instead the business press dumped on the founders for “selling out.” In 2010 it got worse with an Act in parliament about the Monitoring of Foreigners’ Corporate Acquisitions. Lessons Learned.

Finland 324
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Why Too Many Startups (er) Suck

Steve Blank

Either way, the “hurdle” for successful, scalable startups is high, and it gets higher every day as customer acquisition challenges continue to increase. Filed under: Customer Development. The “it” is a physical or web product they’ve often been locked-down, pounding away at, for many weeks.

Startup 332
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How Do You Want to Spend Your Next 4 Years of Your Life?

Steve Blank

Now that you’ve gotten to know your potential channel and customers, regardless of how much money you’re going to make, will you enjoy working with these customers for the next 3 or 4 years? It was a lifelong lesson that taught me to never start a business where you hate your customers. It never goes well.

Cofounder 325
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Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model

Steve Blank

Finally, when everyone else had their turn, the grey-haired VC turned to the founder and said, “If you do what we tell you to do and fail, we’ll fire you. The Customer Development model that I write and teach about is the entrepreneur’s version of Boyds’ OODA loop.). But at least you’d be executing your plan not ours.