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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. Why is it only alarming now?

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Lessons Learned: Using AdWords to assess demand for your new.

Startup Lessons Learned

Dont worry about selecting particularly good keywords, if youre new to SEM. If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

Demand 167
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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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Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

Startup Lessons Learned

Heres my favorite part: If youve got a team, part of the team should obsess about the backlist, honing it, editing it and promoting it, while the rest work to generate (as opposed to promote) the frontlist. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Bring your questions.

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The Lean LaunchPad – Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Management Science

Steve Blank

We have two great teaching assistants , plus we’ve rounded up a team of 25 mentors (VC’s and entrepreneurs) to help coach the teams. There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) Why Teach This Class? to optimize this search.

Wiki 315
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Your Product Needs to be 10x Better than the Competition to Win. Here’s Why:

Both Sides of the Table

He was a life-long entrepreneur and the first business he created out of college (actually, he founded it while he was at Caltech) was a company that manufactured high quality audio speakers. He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards.

Product 350
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Lessons Learned: Don't launch

Startup Lessons Learned

Do some Customer Development instead. Figuring this out takes time, and few entrepreneurs have the patience to wait it out, because the business plan does such a good job of explaining what customers are going to think. The problem is that customers dont read your business plan. Help you raise money. Dont scale.