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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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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. This made me believe deeply in the extreme importance of talking to customers before investing time and money, something I took to my next startup. ————-. The Crater in my rookie days.

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How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition

Steve Blank

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. One of the problems they run into is building a web site. and Balsamiq and throwing together a web site.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Early-stage Regional Venture Funds–part 2 of 3 of Bigger in Bend

Steve Blank

The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 These four developments, while important to Silicon Valley, are vital to developing regional tech clusters. While the density of Silicon Valley startups can’t be replicated in regions, the barriers of money and resources have disappeared.

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China Startups – The Gold Rush and Fire Extinguishers (Part 5 of 5)

Steve Blank

But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley. They’re used to using the web and increasingly the mobile web for everything, commerce, communication, games, etc. web site, they create another 100,000 VPN users. Of course “copy” is too strong a word.

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The Government Starts an Incubator: The National Science Foundation Innovation Corps

Steve Blank

These weren’t 22-year olds who wanted to build a social shopping web site. We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This methodology forces rapid hypothesis testing and Customer Development by getting out of the building while building the product.

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