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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. Here’s what the product development diagram looks like from a sales perspective.

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Seven Things Your Customers Can Do Better Than You

YoungUpstarts

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ The old paradigm works like this: Your company produces goods and services that help customers get a job done. In return, the customers pay you money.

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Lessons Learned: Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a.

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 19, 2009 Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a response) Inc Magazine has a great new piece up about the increasing use of the Minimum Viable Product by businesses (and not just startups). Read the rest. For that, release early, release often will suffice.

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9 Deadliest Start-up Sins

Steve Blank

magazine is publishing a 12-part series of excerpts from The Startup Owner’s Manual , the new step-by-step “how to” guide for startups. The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book.

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Are You Putting Your Rock Star Customers To Work?

YoungUpstarts

Talented product developers. Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. If so, the business world is full of specialists who are all too eager to help.

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Seven Reasons Why Customer Reference Programs Fail

YoungUpstarts

It must cross boundaries, working cooperatively with other divisions in your business such as sales, marketing, social media, PR, product development, and the like. These may include references, referrals, testimonials, serving on advisory boards, and participating in your customer communities, he explains.

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He's Only in Field Service

Steve Blank

And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in Customer Development. As another example, I could see which magazines are on people desks, and that tells me where to advertise.