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Customer Development is Not a Focus Group

Steve Blank

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) release of the product.

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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# Context here.) At the time this was a pretty controversial decision.

Engineer 205
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Lead and Disrupt

Steve Blank

These tools—Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and Business Model design—became the lean start-up methodology , a rigorous approach to testing hypotheses and building prototypes, and, on the basis of data and evidence, adjusting or pivoting to a variant of the original hypothesis. Scaling is the crux of ambidexterity.

Incubator 408
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Why Too Many Startups (er) Suck

Steve Blank

Find the right trajectory for your business and focus not only on reaching it, but on assuring that the result is a sustainable, repeatable profit engine that can perform and grow healthily over time. Filed under: Customer Development. What’s the point? What are they waiting for? It’s the only way to make a startup not suck.

Startup 332
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Entrepreneurship is an Art not a Job

Steve Blank

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management. George Bernard Shaw.

Agile 332
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China Startups – The Gold Rush and Fire Extinguishers (Part 5 of 5)

Steve Blank

Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. I heard from a few investors that as the startup ecosystem is relatively new, there’s a battle for experienced engineering talent and lack of experienced C-level execs. Fear of Failure.

China 324