Remove Business Plan Remove Product Development Remove Revenue Remove Silicon Valley
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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Once the product begins to ship, startup sales execs use orders and revenue as its marker of progress in understanding customers. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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The Leading Cause of Startup Death – Part 1: The Product.

Steve Blank

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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10 Tests of Your Modern Entrepreneur Lingo Savvy

Startup Professionals Musings

See how many you have personally experienced already, or are currently mentioned in your business plan: Crowd-sourcing equity. Minimum Viable Product (MVP). See how many of the following “new” entrepreneur concepts you recognize, and can explain in terms of impact and value to your startup. Gamification. Startup pivot.

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Vertical Markets 4: Putting it All Together « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

Customer Development by Vertical - Click to Enlarge (As a reminder, the Customer Development process says your business plan is just a series of untested hypothesis (unless you’re a domain expert.) You take your product vision and get out of your building to turn your hypothesis into facts. Waterfall, Agile, Lean?

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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. Is there a profitable business model? What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking?