2010 Channel Customer Development SEM 
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 7, 2008
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.
Steve Blank
APRIL 30, 2009
SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. Or blame my MarCom department who approved it.
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Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 22, 2008
Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. In this model, you take some fraction of the lifetime value of each customer and plow that back into paid acquisition through SEM, banner ads, PR, affiliates, etc.
Startup Lessons Learned
NOVEMBER 7, 2008
Dont worry about selecting particularly good keywords, if youre new to SEM. If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Just put in your credit card. I used to use $.05,
Steve Blank
DECEMBER 7, 2010
If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. are what make it a business, 2) business plans are fine for large companies where there is an existing market, existing product and existing customers.
Startup Lessons Learned
OCTOBER 7, 2008
The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. As the channel gets more and more crowded, just launching an app in the store is getting worse and worse as a strategy for each new entrant. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral.
Startup Lessons Learned
MARCH 13, 2009
Again, its critical to focus your marketing launch on those publications, venues, and channels that your potential partners are paying attention to. Do some Customer Development instead. Dont chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Help you raise money. Dont scale.
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