article thumbnail

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development

Startup Lessons Learned

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.

article thumbnail

How NextView Thinks About Pre-Seed Rounds as VC Investors

View from Seed

As a founder, you and your team are building value every day, but there are certain step-function moments where the value creation significantly increases. This is the best time to fundraise because that’s when you are able to command a meaningfully higher valuation for your next round to minimize your own dilution.

Cofounder 120
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

A real Customer Advisory Board

Startup Lessons Learned

One example is having a real Customer Advisory Board. They had their own private forum, and a company founder (aka me) personally ran the group in its early days. Every time you listen to customers, you fear diluting your vision. One example is having a real Customer Advisory Board. Here’s what it looks like.

article thumbnail

Should You Co-Found Your Company With a Software Development Shop (2 of 2)?

David Teten

Should you co-found your company with a software development shop? I’ve talked with a number of software development shops who are eager to get into the business of cofounding companies, i.e., getting product revenue and equity instead of just consulting revenue. What are the terms of their relationship with the founder?

article thumbnail

Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

And as everyone’s attention starts to focus on those same indicators, their value is being diluted. We’ve learned that data can be used as a reality-check against vision without diluting the mission or reverting to “sum of all features&# focus groups. Which leads to the next problem: We need new status indicators.

article thumbnail

Why Continuous Deployment?

Startup Lessons Learned

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? This is why they gladly pay top dollar for a QA group that is supposed to be that "1%" that finds the bugs first (now how good a job they actually do is a whole different subject!) Take a look and let me know what you think.

article thumbnail

How We Think About Pre-Seeds at NextView

Rob Go

As a founder, you and your team are building value every day, but there are certain step-function moments where the value creation significantly increases. This is the best time to fundraise because that’s when you are able to command a meaningfully higher valuation for your next round to minimize your own dilution.