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3 Major Product Fails, And How To Avoid Their Mistakes

YoungUpstarts

Here’s a look at three of the largest recent product fails, the reasons behind them, and how research can help you avoid the same pitfalls: 1. Google released Chromebook in October 2011, offering a faster and easier way to access the Internet. The product was known as a “thin client” and had no hard drive. Google Chromebook.

Product 178
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Seven Things Your Customers Can Do Better Than You

YoungUpstarts

You take that money and invest a good portion of it in traditional sales and marketing efforts — including product developers, creative people, and salespeople, all of whom are paid to figure out what buyers want and to say good things about your company — in a quest to get even more customers. Close the sale.

Customer 155
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Gnip Is On Fire

Feld Thoughts

Oh, and they are hiring as fast as they can find great people ; across the spectrum (business, sales, & engineering). I expect we’ll look back on 2011 as the year that Gnip went from a highly product development focused company to a company that was firing on all cylinders.

CTO Hire 131
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It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem

ConversionXL

So What is Customer Development? Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, developed a methodology for creating businesses that runs in parallel with the traditional product development process. The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses.

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The End Of Marketing As We Know It

YoungUpstarts

A pair of wake-up-call studies by the Fournaise Marketing Group in London in 2011 and 2012 found that more than 70 percent of CEOs think that their chief marketing officers lack business credibility, lack the ability to generate acceptable growth, and lack the ability to explain how their programs will lead to increased business.

Marketing 188
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Startup CEO New Years Resolutions

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Scott Albro of Focus , a knowledge sharing community for business people, has fully embraced the idea of constant iteration for 2011, taking the best practices of social media to the business media world. Our engineers often come up with great ideas, and they are the most productive when they work on these ideas.

Stealth 60
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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.

Steve Blank

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.