Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. However, when I looked into the detail, most of them did not have even early adaptors and the problem wasn’t “chasm crossing,” it was that almost nobody wanted their products. ————-.

Japan 292

Japan Customer Development Developer Customer 292

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

They needed to be sure that what they were building was what customers wanted and needed. And if their initial guesses were wrong, they needed a process that would permit them to change early on in the product development process when the cost of changes was small – the famed “pivot”.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

It was fall 2004, and the presidential election was in full swing. One day, we became convinced that a killer app for IMVU would be to sell a presidential debate bundle, where our customers could put on a Bush or Kerry avatar, and then engage in mock debates with each other. What is customer development?

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

So the natural comparison, we thought, would be to other 3D avatar based products, like The Sims and World of Warcraft. But the early customers all compared it to MySpace. This was 2004, and we had never even heard of MySpace, let alone had any understanding of social networking. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

On Customer Development in a growing company, Wyatt offered the following advice: Wyatt: We''ve employed a number of systems in the organization that keep all of us close to the customer. There are 5-10 customers in our office (or remote) per week for developers, product owners and marketers to speak to and validate learning.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

What happened when we got early press (circa 2004) in violation of our own no-PR rule. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Learn why you dont want to do premature press, despite all the pressure youll feel to "launch" early.

Lean 74

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 74

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Those rates gave us a map that told us a lot about our customers; insights that proved stable even when the company grew orders of magnitude bigger. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing. BillSeitz - yes, but that was already true back in 2004.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164