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Always Right: Five Risks You Must Take With Your Customers

YoungUpstarts

by Tom Panaggio, author of “ The Risk Advantage: Embracing the Entrepreneur’s Unexpected Edge “ Here’s one of business’s dirty little secrets: Many business owners prefer to keep their customers at arm’s length. Nobody likes feeling unimportant, and with all of the choices out there today, customers don’t have to settle for it.

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SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) That’s 10x what many websites convert.

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Introduction to Growth Hacking for Startups

VC Cafe

The term “Growth Hacking”, invented by Sean Ellis , and made popular by Andrew Chen , a Silicon valley marketer and entrepreneur, is a combination of two disciplines – marketing and coding: Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?”

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Less is More, More or Less

Steve Blank

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. And once you got the data you asked for, it still took weeks or months for a marketer to tease out any customer insight and trends from the data. An Epiphany.

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Learning is better than optimization (the local maximum problem)

Startup Lessons Learned

Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. Many optimizers are in favor of split-testing, too: direct marketers, landing page and SEO experts -- heck even the Google Website Optimizer team. There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details.