Remove Customer Development Remove Founder Remove Matching Remove Partner
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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. Dave was building a mobile app for matching college students who needed to move within a local area with potential local movers.

Cofounder 336
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How To Find the Right Co-Founders?

Steve Blank

How do you figure out what’s the right mix of skills for the co-founders of your startup? I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. . Trying to figure out what the right set of co-founders isn’t so clear.

Cofounder 335
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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Early-stage Regional Venture Funds–part 2 of 3 of Bigger in Bend

Steve Blank

Dino Vendetti a VC at Bay Partners, moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster. Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. This experience has provided me a whole new set of pattern matching filters as an investor.

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How Do You Want to Spend Your Next 4 Years of Your Life?

Steve Blank

I pointed out that the “data” you gather in 10 weeks (talking to 100+ customers, partners, payers, etc.,) It was a lifelong lesson that taught me to never start a business where you hate your customers. You don’t want to do Customer Development with them. are not the first thing you should look at.

Cofounder 325
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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Marketing Communications

Steve Blank

Create awareness of our company and brand for potential customers. Create awareness for fundraising (VC, angels, corporate partners). This is often a tough concept for engineering founders who believe that if we just tell customers about the features that make their product faster, cheaper, etc. they’ll win.).

Marketing 310
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Launching a Portfolio Acceleration Platform at a Venture Capital or Private Equity Fund

David Teten

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog.