Everything I know from 4 years of intensive customer development & sales, boiled down into an 18 minutes talk I gave at HackFwd in Berlin. HD video is here , normal is embedded below. I’m pretty happy with this one and think you won’t have heard the content elsewhere. Watch it! Best of Listening Pitching & sellin MORE >>

This post describes a solution – the  Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how  Eric Ries and the  Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development  activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. It rarely happens that way.) MORE >>

m a big believer that the right kind of business development deals can lead to fantastic results for a company—if planned well, appropriately simple, and executed correctly. The Standard Deal The “standard deal” is minimum viable product for business development. If you’re going to do product, do product. Very simple, very effective. MORE >>

Entrepreneurship and early stage companies are about moving fast; if you’re caught in a disagreement for days at a time it means decisions are not being made and/or people are walking around feeling resentful.  Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture. Customer Development Family/Career/Culture MORE >>

Since so much of the focus in an early stage startup should be spent validating assumptions , an essential task is to prioritize the assumptions that need to be validated. You should be able to answer questions like: How will customers discover us? They can help you develop a strategy to pursue bigger market opportunities.  MORE >>