Remove Cofounder Remove Customer Development Remove Direct Marketing Remove Revenue
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Always Right: Five Risks You Must Take With Your Customers

YoungUpstarts

Unless you’re running your business from underneath a rock, you know that losing a customer is a big deal because it has a significant impact on your organizational health. Besides the loss of potential future revenue, any sunk costs (costs you initially incur to gain the customer) are unrecoverable.

Customer 170
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SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. Or by a VP of Marketing who talks “branding&# , SEO/SEM, PR agency, etc.

Sales 120
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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. Many optimizers are in favor of split-testing, too: direct marketers, landing page and SEO experts -- heck even the Google Website Optimizer team. Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first?