What I saw yesterday is further evidence of this – 13 teams spent from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon using the Lean Startup Methodology, the concept of customer development, and the lean startup canvas to go from idea through a series of validated learnings to get to a better idea.

One key takeaway that tied the concepts of Lean Startups back in to community development was his assertion that customer development *is* community building. You can cultivate, develop, and architect them, but you have to structure them in a way that they manage themselves. The meeting was held at the ChaiONE offices.

The main way we prove we have achieved the minimum viable product is to deliver to the company several live, referenceable customers (for platform and business products, I advocate at least six; for consumer services I advocate at least 12). Until you have these reference customers, nothing else really matters. Everything is hard.

” To turn hypotheses into facts, founders need to get out of the building and test them in front of customers. The best Customer Development experiments are short, simple, objective pass/fail tests. Market type determines the startup’s customer feedback and acquisition activities and spending.

By Ron Kaufman, author of “ Uplifting Service: The Proven Path to Delighting Your Customers, Colleagues, and Everyone Else You Meet ” The last thing a customer with a complaint wants to hear you say is: “You’re wrong.” Your customer says: “Your staff was rude and totally unprofessional.”. He is the founder of UP!

The excerpts, which appeared first at  Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Assuming you know what the customer wants. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need. Customer Development

Unlike many other startup processes, Customer Development is deep, detailed, and rigorous. For now, we’re going to focus on the two most powerful of all—the rules that help determine your ultimate success: Get total team buy-in, and get out of the building where your customers (and facts) live. Why founders?

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

customer development features product development lean startup startups tech customer validation feedbackAs it turns out, every user we talked to was an idiot….

We have been exploring how to deploy these resources and/or develop new ones to launch a web-based product for entrepreneurs and innovators (the mice). Core tools : Survey conducted in conjunction with HBR.org (600+ responses); persona development. In the analogy in our title, they’re the elephant.

The second thing is to really dig in and to make sure you are getting the right data and customer development. They have to build investor stories and then they also have to build customer stories. When they go up to a customer, they have to be able to tell their story. It is never a simple process. Same with investors.

They assume that the tasks that they are performing during the early stage of startup development are the same tasks that will be performed during the next and very different stages. How should founders deal with such developments? How should founders deal with such developments? Lessons Learned. by Eric Ries. Contact. Tweet.

It’s innovative, delivers clear and substantial value, and is deeply appreciated by your customers. Trouble is, there just aren’t enough of them – customers, that is. Otherwise, it’s tough to make it up on volume unless the lifetime value of new customers is well understood and highly valuable.

Step 1: Customer Discovery Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder’s vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis. Will the right product drive significant numbers of customers to buy or engage with the product?

Stories about the growth of "hot" startups such as Facebook, Instagram, AirBNB, and others have created a belief that if you build the right product, customer acquisition will be easy. These stories are the exception, not the rule, and don't tell the entire story of the immense effort it took to grow their customer bases. hope not.

If our school is to retain its current standards in terms of access and excellence we think it is of paramount importance that we develop an overarching campus strategy that enables and supports online innovation. But the minute the memo started talking about a Policy Team developing detailed implementation plans, it was all over.

After 5 days the teams collectively had ~1,200 face-to-face customer interviews, with another 1,000+ potential customers surveyed on-line. The Business Model Canvas + Customer Development works even in this short amount of time. However we were in NYC where customer density was high. The Setup. The Class.

By the beginning of the 21st century, entrepreneurs, led by Web and mobile startups, began to seek and develop their own management tools. It offered a re-examination of the existing product-introduction process and delineated a radically different method that brings customers and their needs headfirst into the process long before the launch.

Filed under: Customer Development , Technology. Customer Development TechnologyThe quickest way to create a billion dollar company is to take basic human social needs and figure out how to mediate them on-line. It’s your turn. Hard-wired. Is It a Problem or a Need? Moving Needs to Bits = a billion dollars. Of course. 

Those that go through the early customer development and Lean Startup process may feel paralyzed or derailed for a bit, but they come out the other end with a much clearer picture of where to run. The same holds true with customer development interviews. (Powered by LaunchBit ). There are a few things at work here.

This is also true when doing customer development interviews; there’s room for customers to talk freely of course, but if you don’t have a script and solid agenda, you’ll find that you spend the time chatting casually with customers and not really learning anything. (Powered by LaunchBit ). Nice!).

Matt Brezina (Xobni, Sincerely ) for advice on customer development, finding product/market fit and scaling user acquisition. Have you ever wanted to get first-hand advice from the founder of a successful startup? Or at least get to shoot the breeze for a while and get a sense of what they've been through and what awaits you? Sponsor.

We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. Oh, you pivoted when your team analyzed customer feedback?” I’m feeling guilty because I was using Customer Development and the Startup Owners Manual until I had that insight.

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers. So by popular demand, here’s a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto.

and author of “ Relevant Selling: Research Proves Customers Value More Than Just Price “ What customers value most changes constantly, and the pace of change has increased exponentially with the economic recession. With demand increasing, customers have more difficulty getting what they want on time. by Jaynie L.

63 scientists and engineers in  21 teams  made ~ 2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. We now know how to reduce customer and market risk for new ventures. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Technology. Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Technology

Lean Startups and Customer Development early adopters problemsEntrepreneurs should stop talking about abstract solutions and frame their pitches in terms of solving real problems, but I was wrong. Problems don't exist.

Outsourcing your startup’s early technical development to a dev shop is like riding an elephant in a horseback polo match. Alternatively, the startup mistakenly believes that the dev shop will deliver a turn-key product that will not require additional development through the customer development process.

Our feedback widget requires no customization and intelligently evolves as more users provide feedback.  Over time we plan to offer additional premium services to help with positioning, targeting and eventually customer acquisition. Not a Replacement for Customer Development. Each new product update can change it. 

Eric Ries, Steve Blank and others are criticized for choosing terms and phrases — lean, customer development, MVP, fail fast, etc. Those who run in #LeanStartup circles know too well the problems encountered with language.  Doesn’t “viable” contain “desirable?” Don’t Think Big.

This team spoke face-to-face with 326 customers. As often happens, this team came into class convinced that their market research proved that their business was providing credit to underbanked customers.  The ParkPoint Capital customer discovery narrative blog is here. Team DentalOptics spoke face-to-face with 72 customers. 

It means they have to deal with finances and customers and investors and other things that aren’t what they love to do, which is building software. Ask anybody what a software developer does and they can give you the one-sentence “makes software” answer. If yes, hire a contract developer. Website. As Nick P.

The Scene Developers Nailing that elusive technical co-founder. Is there a junior or senior developer from a previous gig who will respect you for a previous role and be ready to build their own baby with you? Development by Message and Adrian McShane. The Kernel. New technology for enquiring minds. Thursday, 8 March 2012.

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Consequently, I either needed a tech co-founder or to pay someone to develop the product. Prior to Sorced, Elizabeth worked in business development at SecondMarket.

Getting customer feedback is essential in the early stages of your company--but it's what you do with it that determines your fate. The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. Yep, sounds good. Ok, still sounds good.

The class is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world. Students The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known.  Here are the first five.

Maybe I didn’t do enough customer development, and I need to re-engage with more customers. Personal Development Startups customer development Entrepreneurship intellectual honesty(Powered by LaunchBit ). I’m a big believer in intellectual honesty. Or a “reality distortion field.”

Lean Startups and Customer DevelopmentI was at Lean Startup Machine in New York last weekend and I was so impressed by a post by Cindy Alvarez that Trevor distributed, 10 Things I’ve Learned, that I decided to blatantly copy her and create my own top ten list. Unfortunately I’m a terrible editor.

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of customer development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. He got my attention when he said, "following your customer development stuff is making my company fail." We Did Everything Customers Asked For. Sponsor. asked?

found myself listing things here like “Customer Development”, “Software Development”, “Developers”, etc. Lean Canvas was designed for entrepreneurs, not consultants, customers, advisors, or investors. First a quick timeline. So I started trading boxes. Which version should I use?

Today's Punt is a perfectly timed post on customer development from, of course, Steve Blank. link] Enjoy. Then go kick some business model ass

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. He got my attention when he said, “following your customer development stuff is making my company fail.” We Did Everything Customers Asked For. Yep, sound good.

Lean Startups and Customer Development build measure learn Minimum Viable Product startupThe Build Measure Learn loops is backwards. There is a presumption that if you build something and slap some analytics on it then you will inevitably learn.

This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. Yet year after year, decade after decade, VC’s would watch as no startup business plan survived first contact with customers. Business Plan vs. Business Model + Customer Development. It takes a ton of face-face customer interactions.

Over Saturday and Sunday, teams will focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. Startup Weekend Singapore is back! First started in July of 2007 in Boulder, Colorado, the movement has since spread across the world.

The investment will be spent on building the team, user growth and customer development. We're surely going to see positive development in that space in the coming years The investment values the company now at 88 million Swedish kronor (€10 million). Just last week Instacast (podcast app) announced support for Flattr.

By not adequately using lean startup methodology for its customer development process, Aardvark had created a great product that people did not need. Launching Tech Ventures by Kara Yu We’ve seen a lot of companies struggle to achieve viral growth: Aardvark, Triangulate, Cake. What’s going on?

The lineup includes some awesome speakers and Lean Startup / customer development experts: Steve Blank , Ash Maurya , Dan Martell , Brant Cooper , Patrick Vlaskovits , Dave Feinleib and Noah Kagan. (Powered by LaunchBit ). must say that I was very surprised when I was asked to speak at the Michigan Lean Startup Conference on May 17th.

Freshman Salesman writes: I’ve read somewhere in your blog about how you had a very large organisation as the first customer for your software. I’m putting myself in the same boat now with the solution I’m developing so could you tell me: 1. How did you reach out to your first customer? think you meant this ?

Two years in the making and literally ten years in development, I’m proud to announce that my new book, The Startup Owners Manual , goes onto the printing press next Tuesday.  In fact, you could say that all that remains from my last book are the four steps of Customer Development.  Let me be brief…. Briefly, the new book.

Lean Startups and Customer Development User Experience drawing how to draw lean user experience user experienceWe endlessly debate, only to be frustrated by a 10 px difference in alignment that could be easily understood if we were in the same room and could point to it.

Customer Development Customer Support Entrepreneurship User Experience customer support Minimum Viable Product MVP user experience uxIs anyone else out there sick of signing up for on-line products that don't do what they promised? It's only an MVP" is a poor excuse for bad user experience.

So customers that tell you that you suck could be your most valuable ones ever. You need to understand your customers as much as possible. Customer Development customer development feedback lean startup(Powered by LaunchBit ). Negative feedback hurts. It’s easy to take personally and get offended.

Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. Just about every weekend someplace on the planet a peculiar series of meetups is happening called Startup Weekend. So far the model seems to be working: each weekend on average has produced two or three companies.

Should they follow the Steve Blank, Customer Development Process school of product development or the Steve Jobs "vision" school? Houston kept focusing on a test and learn approach to product development, event creating a "Votebox" feature that allowed users to vote for the product changes they wanted most.

In the process of acquiring new customers, startups need to persuade, convince or enchant the potential customer to sacrifice a resource, let it be time, money, access to their stream of information, in order to use the startup’s product. Developers added the option to “gift back” and it works like a charm.

In the process of acquiring new customers, startups need to persuade, convince or enchant the potential customer to sacrifice a resource, let it be time, money, access to their stream of information, in order to use the startup’s product. Another example for likeability is Zappos customer service.

We're talking with as many institutional investor customers as we can to get their input on what they need. This is just customer development 101, a la Steve Blank. For startups, customer data is the best data. The following is a guest post by Ty Danco. Ty is an angel investor and startup mentor. Don't keep it secret.

These days, most entrepreneurs I talk to understand the importance of speaking with customers before building a full-blown product. But unfortunately, I often speak with entrepreneurs that have only talked to one or two customers. The danger in speaking with too few customers is that you bet too much on too little data. Maybe.

Topics include sessions such as startup fundraising, customer development, business model generation, lean startup metrics, visual note taking and much more: [link]. I’m currently at LeanCamp , the unconference that aspires to help people both learn and teach evrerything Lean Startup related. What is Leancamp? What is Leancamp?

Topics include sessions such as startup fundraising, customer development, business model generation, lean startup metrics, visual note taking and much more: [link]. I’m currently at LeanCamp , the unconference that aspires to help people both learn and teach evrerything Lean Startup related. What is Leancamp? What is Leancamp?

2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision  (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers. Ironically, it was Valenti’s skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership. from box-office revenue. The reality? Sound familiar? Piracy.

The incubator will be located in downtown Oslo and was put together using the same fundamentals as Y Combinator, TechStars, and other intensive incubators that provide a strong focus on customer development and give a small amount of seed funding. The deadline for the application is January 8th. .

Mark Suster gives advice for startups with applications that face a substitution threat from in-house versions developed by big platforms. Customer Discovery and Validation Laura Klein describes five fast/cheap/easy approaches to user research and usability testing. List of resources for designers and developers from Brian Hernandez.

Today's punt is over to Steve Blank, the Customer Development evangelist, professor, guru, and all around great American. Talk to customers. He gets it. Get out of the building". Talk to prospects. Talk to lost prospects. Learn your market firsthand. Yesterday he posted this interview --worth the listen. Have a great day!

Potential customers may ask how you are different than them. You may lose some customers, but in the long haul, a competitor can't be you by just being cheaper. Many startups will not be competing with other startups, but with the internal development teams of their larger customers. Find A Giant As An Ally. Why is this?

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development. Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan Business Model versus Business Plan Customer DevelopmentI was lucky enough to get interviewed by Rob Morris of  American Entrepreneur Radio.

Understanding customer value is by far the most important factor when looking for ways to grow your business. We’re finance guys at heart , but we’ve learned that metrics such as operating profits, EBITDA, and revenue growth can only approximate the real performance driver of your business: customer value.

If we only add 1000 customers at $1,000 each, we'll have a million more of revenue". 1% tells you nothing about customers. You can automate but early on you'll have difficulty converting without customer contact). Then develop a set of questions to ask to the broader market. top-down analysis is tempting. Really. Don't.

Providing exceptional customer service has long been seen as a competitive advantage. All of these changes actually underscore the importance of getting back to the basics of treating customers as individuals with unique needs. In 2012, smart, forward-looking companies will be viewing customer service in new ways. Being Social.

63 scientists and engineers in  21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. And since the rest of the slides were about Customer Development, I taught those.

Customer Development Startups market analysis research(Powered by LaunchBit ) Startup founders often say to me, “We’re going ahead with this new startup … we’ve identified a gap in the market!” There’s a gap in the market. The question to ask at that point is simple: “Is there really a gap?”

You’ll learn how to use a business model canvas to brainstorm each part of a company and customer development to get out of the classroom to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product. That’s exactly what you can get from Steve Blank , at Stanford University, starting in February. How cool is that? Idea

But even if you have not launched yet, you can still gather the same insight through customer development. Hearing pitches for a living I get to hear from entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes and all manner of pitching styles. Every investor has their own preferred style that resonates with them. You have to be yourself.

But some of our students hadn’t yet developed a passion for entrepreneurship and had no burning idea that they wanted to bring to market. In a perfect world you build your vision and your customers would run to buy your first product exactly as you spec’d and built it. Customer Development Family/Career/Culture Lean LaunchPad Teachin

customer development process data analysis startupsFirst-time reader? Get future posts via my  RSS feed ,  following me on Twitter , or  subscribing via email. Hope you enjoy the posts! One of the hardest decisions you have to make, as an entrepreneur, is deciding when to give up on your current struggling project. Sunk cost.

prolific educator, thought leader and writer on Customer Development for Startups, Blank teaches, refines, writes and blogs on “Customer Development,” a rigorous methodology he developed to bring the “scientific method” to the typically chaotic, seemingly disorganized startup process. Houston Lean Startup Circle

We have begun integrating Lean Startup and Customer Development methodology into our teaching at George Mason University. Great interview with Eric Ries ( Lean Startup ) by Ned Smith of BusinessNewsDaily : “You have to really want to know the truth more than you want to be right,” Ries said. Build-measure-learn.

Startup Customer Discovery Questions. When you are dealing with literally hundreds of products it gets pretty hard for customers to find what they are looking for. We just launched our public cloud called IBM Smart Business Development and Test on IBM Cloud. « How To Get a Better Customer Quote. customer.

Lean Startup Circle Houston – Steve Blank – Customer Development – Thursday Dec. Who ever says that things slow down for the holiday season hasn’t looked at the Houston tech calendar lately (probably because there isn’t One, single calendar – but that’s a rant for another day.

Lean Startup Circle Houston – Steve Blank – Customer Development – Thursday Dec. Who ever says that things slow down for the holiday season hasn’t looked at the Houston tech calendar lately (probably because there isn’t One, single calendar – but that’s a rant for another day.

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery , iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments. Bob started hiring second rate developers. Steve Jobs. Takeoff.

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery , iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments. Bob started hiring second-rate developers. ” I asked.

By Peter Fader, author of “ Wharton Executive Education Customer Centricity Essentials: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters “ I often use the metaphor of fishing as a way to explain new customer acquisition. Up-selling: moving customers up to higher level products/services. ” So how does it work?

If you have no knowledge of your customer segment’s workflow, then that is the riskiest part of your business. Hustle to set up some customer development meetings as a proxy for building a sales pipeline. Find a war in which you’ll have an edge. But how do you know what that is? Write a blog.

Customers don't buy when you want them to. You need to develop a pricing strategy. You need to discover your value to potential customers. When you talk with prospects, when you talk with lost prospects, when you talk with customers, you learn. Your customers? Black Friday has never held any significance to me.

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. But we managed to grow a few customers, so that’s good, in spite of the name. You are coordinating customers by email. Why listen? Jason: OK.

Customer Development Entrepreneurship Lean startup startup visionThere is an ongoing misconception that creating a company under a lean startup approach is incompatible with a big entrepreneurial vision.

But finding the perfect people or customers in that list is another story. This is where it’s so important to have a hypothesis and assumptions around the ideal customer. Without a strong definition of your supposed ideal customer, it becomes too tempting and too easy to hand out beta accounts like candy.

Our Lean LaunchPad class teaches scientists and engineers that starting a company is another research project that can be solved by an iterative process of hypotheses testing and experimentation built around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Some men see things as they are and ask why.

Seems like eons ago… Then we were introduced to agile development, which encouraged us to throw away big specifications and go with user stories, or to eliminate documentation entirely and just start coding, building things iteratively. Not to overwhelm developers with detail, but to eliminate as much future risk as possible.

Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. The 5th edition of Startup Weekend Dallas will be held at the Gravity Centre in Plano, Texas next weekend (November 18-20, 2011). Get your tickets here: [link].

Loggr's model is freemium: free to developers up to 100 events per day, with 7 days of storage. The customers would be any energy company. The project is still in development, but it looks more and more promising every month. Last night 13 area tech founders met to talk about our businesses. What's the pain? We'll get there.

Find the customers first, then build for them. I’ve spent ages testing different customer development approaches and struggling to come to terms with building repeatable sales roadmaps. Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. It has been fascinating. was missing the implied qualifiers.

Find the customers first, then build for them. I’ve spent ages testing different customer development approaches and struggling to come to terms with building a repeatable sales roadmaps. Roughly a month ago, I decided to give blogging another try, in earnest. It has been fascinating. was missing the implied qualifiers.

Quantifying “value” Common wisdom is that you price your product in terms of value [to the customer] rather than cost [to you]. This knowledge will eventually turn into a repeatable sales roadmap as you grow toward adding non-founders to your sales & customer team. You’re a startup. It’s okay.

Quantifying “value” Common wisdom is that you price your product in terms of value [to the customer] rather than cost [to you]. This knowledge will eventually turn into a repeatable sales roadmap as you grow toward adding non-founders to your sales & customer team. You’re a startup. It’s okay.

I’m talking about providing magical experiences to customers. Most customers don’t understand the technology that exists behind the products they use. Customers want results. Customer Development customer development design product design selling technologyStartups need to sell magic.

In the world of low-cost startups, where the ability to launch apps makes startups a dime a dozen (and dozen and dozen and dozen), and methodologies like Lean Startup reign, we have developed into a “just launch” culture. Today I started playing with The Eatery , an app by Massive Health. dont *want* to use it. Our users.