Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2014

The importance of the customer feedback cycle & the role it plays for AWeber. How to get your software business to the point where you can hire a business development director. Hunter shares some extremely valuable insights that will prove useful in building beneficial relationships and getting highly qualified customers.

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Developer API Cofounder New Jersey 104

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

If you’re a venture capitalist … you have limited partners that give you money to invest on their behalf, and you’re responsible for giving them outsize returns. Hire around you to fill those weak spots. …. whether that’s partners or employees that you bring on. Nayeem : (Nods.) Nayeem : I didn’t, no.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

That died with waterfall software development. I’m not even talking about your 12-page Powerpoint presentation that you need to raise venture capital or to talk with potential biz dev partners. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small?

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Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 26, 2018

In our experience, structured customer development work is right up there amongst the most valuable things a founder can do in the early days of their startup. Once you have an idea that feels strong, it’s imperative to speak with customers about it. But good customer development is tough to do.

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Customer Framework Differentiation Customer Development 75

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Start by defining your key resources, activities, and partners. Then, consider how you’ll reach your customers and what kind of relationship you want to build with them. Hiring the right people is critical, but it’s just the beginning. Develop a marketing strategy that leverages both digital and traditional channels.

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Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 128

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’re also focusing on developing relationships with and getting buy-in from key partners like the Red Cross and other NGOs.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’re also focusing on developing relationships with and getting buy-in from key partners like the Red Cross and other NGOs.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So They thought about it for a moment and said, “Well we feel like we understand how to build things, but sales is something we thought we’d hire an expert to do.”. Hiring PR Agencies.

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PR China Lean Channel 316

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

Local crop dusters meant they could hire existing planes and simply attach their Hyper-spectral camera to any crop dusting plane. All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Technology. This is a big idea.

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Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 318

Version One Ventures

APRIL 20, 2021

Decentralized storage networks are among the most distributed and secure networks in the world, but they can also require custom development and complex integration. We’re excited to partner with them to make Filebase’s mission a reality! P.S.: Filebase is hiring ! It’s not simple.

API 102

API Portfolio Distribution Networking 102

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

We were impressed when we found that they did the in-person interviews by hiring usertesting.com for $39 to set up test scenarios, gave the users specific tasks to accomplish with their minimum viable product, videotaped the customer interactions and summarized customer likes and dislikes.)

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Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 236

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

A new VP of Sales (then VP of Marketing, then CEO) looks at their predecessors’ strategy, and if they are smart, they do something different (they implement a different pricing model, pick a new sales channel, target different customers and/or partners, reformulate the product features, etc.). No one gets fired.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 248

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So They thought about it for a moment and said, “Well we feel like we understand how to build things, but sales is something we thought we’d hire an expert to do.”. Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 208

PR China Lean Channel 208

David Teten

MARCH 28, 2012

The company teams they work with are usually highly motivated entrepreneurs trying to engage in extensive product and customer development efforts for a product they don’t typically have a full vision of, for a customer whose needs are opaque, and for a use case which is ambiguous.

Portfolio 144

Portfolio Private Equity Venture Capital Early Stage 144

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

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Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 322

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Supercomputers get Personal Back in Sunnyvale my friend had not only been hired but had convinced the team that we should be building hardware – making a new class of computers not a software application. He was my role model at Convergent, mentor at Ardent and partner at E.piphany. We’re building a supercomputer.”

North Carolina 126

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.) Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab.

Silicon Valley 144

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 144

blog.aparttimecto.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Un-knowledgeable - Since it’s just you and your partners, you might not be making the best choices. Find and hire one or more developers Pros: Implementation Speed - Developers working full time will be much more efficient for you and your product since they’ll be dedicated to your company.

CTO Hire 40

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Equity Vesting 40

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. You’ll never have to do it again.) Trade Show Post Mortem Evaluate the experience.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 129

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

When I began to hire product managers, sales reps and implementation staff from existing document management companies like Documentum and OpenText is when I got first-hand input into what lessons they had learned in their companies over the previous decade. So the whole customer development cycle is very streamlined.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

PEVCTech is partnering with Blue Future Partners to run the first large-scale survey of VCs’ technology stack. Johann Kratzer of Blue Future Partners , a fund of funds, observed, “The majority of the hundreds of funds we’ve diligenced rely predominantly on their relationships to source deals. Greylock Partners.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

She partnered with Stanford professor Scott Delp to develop and test a relatively inexpensive, noninvasive, and effective treatment. In the entrepreneurship stage, Kate recently launched a company, Cala Health, to develop and deliver new treatments for tremors. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Technology.

Entrepreneur 335

Entrepreneur Framework Lean Customer Development 335

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

She had so much insight to share that we broke the interview into two parts, 1) Corporate Venture Capital and more broadly, 2) How the Fortune 500 Can Buy, Invest and Partner with the Innovation Economy (coming soon). . Could they excel at customer development with enterprises? Can the founders communicate well?

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Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

The Startup Toolkit

AUGUST 29, 2012

If the founding team is non-technical and you can’t figure out whether you are being screwed by your developers or whether your potential new CTO is amazing, a tech advisor can help by joining you in interviews and reviewing commits. You’ll need to keep hiring tech guys.

Technical Review 38

Technical Review CTO Hire Cap Table Software Review 38

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

We pitch to potential partners, vendors, publishers, conferences, employees, and even lawyers. Dont keep banging your head against the wall - if you cant convince your potential partners that your startup is printing money, try to figure out why. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 128

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Second, and full disclosure, I’ve invested in a few of these funds ; and third my teaching partner Ann Miura-Ko is a partner in one of these funds. Lean VC’s are expert in on-line distribution, Agile and Customer Development. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital. Lean VC’s are Different.

Lean 260

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 260

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

Recently, my friend Harjeet Taggar, partner at US seed fund YCombinator, tweeted that, increasingly, the problems faced by start-ups they fund are being addressed by other start-ups. An increase in tech talent wouldn’t be a bad thing when hiring for established companies either, but we need minds to be both technical and entrepreneurial.

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Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

What went wrong was that the founder had built a product for a New Market and the VC’s allowed him to execute, hire and burn cash like he was in an Existing Market. This may actually work if you’re in an existing market where customers understand what the product does and how to compare it with products that currently exist.

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Revenue Balance Sheet Hockey Stick Burn Rate 231

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly. 1) Enterprise Sales.

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Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

You might get a bunch of inbound emails from other press and partners, and all of these things can contribute to a feeling that you’re on your way to getting tons of traffic. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? It strokes your ego.

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

That year the two founders decided to get serious about being a company, and hired a CEO. In today’s language of Customer Development , RIM positioned the Blackberry as a segment of an existing market – pager users who needed two-way communication. Filed under: Customer Development , Market Types.

Hockey Stick 272

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 272

Steve Blank

APRIL 19, 2011

And finally, I have them experience all of this first hand by teaching them theory side-by-side with immersive hands-on using Customer Development to find a business model. Unlike coaching, there was no specific agenda or goal, but they saw I was competent and open to learning and they cared about me and my long-term development.

Early Stage 296

Early Stage Audience Hiring Business Model 296

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

I trained the Startup Weekend Next Beijing mentors and instructors, presented to several hundred entrepreneurs, and had a great fireside chat with Zhen Fund founding partner Xu Xiaoping in front of another roomful of entrepreneurs. It’s much easier to just steal their ideas and hire their employees. In the U.S. Unlike the U.S.

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Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 269