Customer Customer Development Early Stage Viral 
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. 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?
SoCal CTO
OCTOBER 6, 2011
I’m going to take that thought out into the field and validate it with my customers." I’ve spoken to dozens of customers, I have a validated customer persona, built an MVP to test key behavioral hypotheses, and the data doesn’t back what you’re saying." The other was a consumer play with possible viral growth.
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SoCal CTO
DECEMBER 19, 2012
I was talking with an early-stage founder who has a product vision and wants to get it built. He wanted to get input from me on what he's doing, and he wants to begin to ask developers what it would take to build his product. This should be an iterative process with advisors and customers providing feedback on the product.
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 14, 2009
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product.
The Startup Toolkit
NOVEMBER 10, 2012
It’s as big of a deal as getting your viral loop working — it’s how you’re going to acquire customers at scale. The problem is, early stage sales isn’t about making money. It’s the same reason you can’t outsource customer development.
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 23, 2013
In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs.
Steve Blank
APRIL 20, 2021
Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. It bears repeating: an early-stage startup must focus on making one customer group excited by a mission-aligned product.
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