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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. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. Talk about waste.

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Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc. Expo SF (May.

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Lessons Learned: The lean startup

Startup Lessons Learned

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168
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How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people

Startup Lessons Learned

But the early customers all compared it to MySpace. This was 2004, and we had never even heard of MySpace, let alone had any understanding of social networking. It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business.

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Lessons Learned: Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

Startup Lessons Learned

For companies in the early-adopter phase, you can play "the earlyvangelist game" whenever a customer turns out to be too mainstream for your product. Pick a similar product that they do use, and ask them "who was the first person you know who started using [social networking, mobile phones, plasma TV, instant messaging.]? So why you?

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Lessons Learned: The App Store after the gold rush

Startup Lessons Learned

Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. For example, if any of the mobile ad networks gets major traction, they may become a dominant way that people discover new apps. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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How to get distribution advantage on the iPhone

Startup Lessons Learned

Not many customers ever browse the app directory or search for specific apps - they dont have to, they find out about apps by being invited by a friend. If you sell an online service that solves a defined problem, you can compete in SEO or SEM. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?