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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: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Product Management for Startups in Los Angeles – Steve Gilison

SoCal CTO

I have about 11 years in the technology sector including roles doing market research, sales and product development. My focus has been marketing strategy and product development. Most people think they can do product design. What networking events in Los Angeles or Southern California do you go to?

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Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups

Steve Blank

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Innovation, Change and the Rest of Your Life

Steve Blank

I lived through the time when working in my first job in Ann Arbor Michigan we had to get out a map to find out that San Jose was not only in Puerto Rico but there was a city with that same name in California. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle.

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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. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

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Hologram: Everyday IoT Reaches Scale

View from Seed

They were wrapping up participation in an accelerator program and Ben was planning to move back to Chicago to build the company there, having previously worked at Groupon before moving on to other tech companies in Asia, as well as a brief time in California.

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