Either way, the “hurdle” for successful, scalable startups is high, and it gets higher every day as customer acquisition challenges continue to increase. There’s just no other way but, as Steve Blank has said for a decade, to “get out of the building” and talk to the only folks who matter—your customers. Customer Development MORE >>

A lot of startups come into existence when the founders work to solve their own problems. These days a lot of startups are launched quickly with a couple of technical co-founders. At the same time, there are many startups that are clearly launched because the founders wanted to solve their own problems. MORE >>

His checklist is built for Enterprise Software which doesn’t readily translate to other types of startups including web startups (especially when you get to Customer Validation). After the talk, David Binetti pulled together a great group of people from Lean Startup Circle to create a Customer Development Checklist for web startups. MORE >>

They’re an albatross if they perform as they do in a large company, and believe that they “own&# customer interaction, feedback to engineering and authoring market requirements documents. They’re an asset to a startup if they understand that their job is to get the founder outside the building and in front of customers. MORE >>

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.  It’s not. MORE >>