Steve Blank

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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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. After many sales calls, early prospects showed little rush to buy it! A few of the many quotations that struck me: “Most startups fail due not to the failure of product development but due to the lack of customers”.

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

Steve Blank

Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.

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Leaving Government for the Private Sector – Part 2

Steve Blank

Some commercial company roles: Business Development or “BD” roles : Case Officers are well suited for business development (BD) roles as its akin to first half of the CIA recruitment cycle. Sales roles : The sales cycle is similar to the recruitment cycle of a source. Here’s what I learned.

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Solving the Innovator’s Dilemma – Customer Development in a Big Company

Steve Blank

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. We’re Not Here for a Sales Call. But we are not here for a sales call.&#.

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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. However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web.

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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

My contract developers building the app aren’t very responsive. He was using 3 rd parties to build his app but he had no expertise on how to manage external developers. The emphasis on the rapid development and iteration of MVP’s is to speed up how fast you can learn ; from customers, partners, network scale, adoption, etc.

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