Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 16, 2009
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. And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” It’s an impressive portfolio.
SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 6, 2011
The other was a consumer play with possible viral growth. Would the consumer one get traction and be viral? In both cases, the answer was that the founder would go to find other ideas, turn those into paper descriptions and validate it with customers. Customer Validation 101. " One was an enterprise software product.
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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
NOVEMBER 5, 2014
It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. 1/mo means you can’t afford customer service and it must incrementally free to run the technology behind it, both of which have implications for the sort of product you have to build (e.g.
YoungUpstarts
APRIL 21, 2013
Insufficient capital, over investment, and low sales are just some of the reasons leading to this sobering statistic. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. In the US, about 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years.
The Startup Toolkit
NOVEMBER 10, 2012
Spoiler: You can’t hire out sales because in the early days it’s about learning, not selling, and hired guns can’t bring back bad news. At their peak, Groupon sales reps made 1250 calls per week to close 4 sales[1]. The problem is, early stage sales isn’t about making money.
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 22, 2010
If you are following Customer Development , the answer is easy. Board meetings are about measuring progress measured against the hypotheses in Customer Discovery and Validation. Dave McClure’s AARRR Model is one illustration of the web sales pipeline. Viral Acquisition Ratio. Advertising Expenses. Web Metrics.
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 14, 2009
For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. They are closing orders.
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