It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. One of the key tenets of  Customer Development is that your business model is nothing more than a set of untested hypotheses. Business Model Design Meets Customer Development. MORE >>

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. When I asked him if he actually had personally left the building and talked to these potential customers, or even had gotten them on the phone, he sounded confused.  Customer needs are non-deterministic. MORE >>

As I’ve mentioned many times before: churn (the rate at which customers cancel their subscription) is the most important metric for any recurring revenue business. The longer a customer keeps paying you, the more valuable that customer is. Customer churn then is a count of customers who cancel their accounts. MORE >>

In fact, at the time (1996-1997) we offered both a downloadable product, that our customers could install on their own servers, and a “hosted-offering”, which came to be known as “On-Demand”, then the “ASP” (Application Service Provider) model, and today we call it “SaaS” (Software as a Service). We were desperate to get a marquee customer. MORE >>

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. It seemed like once a week Yuri would come back from a customer meeting brimming with new insights. Which required Ben hearing from the same customers I did. MORE >>