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Why Too Many Startups (er) Suck

Steve Blank

The product is so good, helpful, and easy to use that it literally almost does its own marketing organically through the product’s viral nature, just as Hotmail and Gmail have done since inception. Filed under: Customer Development. It scaled like lightning by solving an urgent, painful problem for millions of consumers.

Startup 332
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A Path to the Minimum Viable Product

Steve Blank

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. It’s lazy thinking (and expensive engineering) to try to build for both at the same time. It has a growth engine.

Product 436
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[Review] The Lean Startup

YoungUpstarts

Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean 193
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Pricing determines your business

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. 1/mo means you can’t afford customer service and it must incrementally free to run the technology behind it, both of which have implications for the sort of product you have to build (e.g. Think: GoDaddy).

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Here, the key metrics are Acquisition and Referral, combined into the now-famous viral coefficient. If the coefficient is > 1.0 , you generally have a viral hit on your hands.

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Introduction to Growth Hacking for Startups

VC Cafe

Growth Hacking isn’t viral marketing (although viral marketing is part of it). and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. If a startup is pre-product/market fit, growth hackers can make sure virality is embedded at the core of a product. Rinse and repeat.

API 167
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Business ecology and the four customer currencies

Startup Lessons Learned

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them. As soon as possible!&#

Customer 156