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Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development

Steve Blank

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

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It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem

ConversionXL

The product or website (be it software, e-commerce, or a service) might be awesome , but if it puts itself in front of the wrong market, or packages itself so the right market can’t figure out why it’s awesome, the startup will fail. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development?

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Can this methodology be used for startups that are not exclusively about software?

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The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development

Startup Lessons Learned

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Four Steps primarily centers its stories and case studies on B2B hardware and software startups.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? For software, we have many - you can enjoy a nice long list on Wikipedia. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." This is a common mistake.

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Lessons Learned: Combining agile development with customer development

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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Document Your MVP for a Developer

SoCal CTO

And in the case of defining mobile/web/software, there is even more variability in terms of form and format. For example, if you are trying to determine viral coefficient (see Startup Metrics ), then the focus should be around those aspects of the MVP. Quite often these things get old quickly. That's fairly uncommon.

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