Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. 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.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 228

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe 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. As a result, the standard product development model is not only useless, it is dangerous.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

I tell these stories to lay the groundwork for what I am going to call Revenue Development. We’re all familiar with Product Development, and thanks to the amazing Steve Blank and Eric Ries , Customer Development has become the mantra for so many startups. Google’s first business model wasn’t based on advertising.

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Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. These don’t require coding skills—they’re usually visual templates that are easy to use but don’t allow for great customization (that would require technical skills). Custom development. WordPress DIY.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

Lean 304

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 304

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique. Stay tuned. He runs H4X Labs.

Lean 413

Lean Security Asia SBIR 413

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 4, 2014

In many cases, new or updated equipment offers some form of functional benefit(s) to your customers, and this can be used as a key selling point. Marketing your business with traditional offline strategies such as television, radio and print advertising can be costly. Find New Sales Channels.

Customer 168

Customer PPC Software Review Finance 168

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 204

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies. Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

It included things like advertising, marketing analytics, cyber security. We started to do that in the advertising space first. Filed under: Customer Development. ” So I wrote a 9-page charter of what I thought we should do. There were things like drones in there. Very, very far-fetched ideas, frankly.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 25, 2014

The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions – crowdspring.co/1nHT6tS. The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions – crowdspring.co/1nHT6tS. Legal Contracts for Software Developers Who Hate Contracts (w/free contract template to use today) – [link].

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Social Media Small Business Design Media 92

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 12, 2020

PPC advertising. An app can not only offer an easy platform for people to make mobile purchases, but it can also ensure that customers are constantly reminded of your business every time they open their phone (which could lead to an increase in return customers). . Social media marketing. Email marketing.

Marketing 246

Marketing Social Media PPC SEO 246

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

crowdSPRING Blog

JUNE 6, 2014

Customer Development 101) – crowdspring.co/1pNIOcD. Crowdsourcing Your Way To What Customers Really Want | Fast Company – crowdspring.co/1oNJIZp. Customer Development 101) – crowdspring.co/1pNIOcD. 20 Killer Resources for Web Designers and Developers | 1stwebdesigner – crowdspring.co/1pNoB6P.

Social Media 94

Social Media Small Business Design Software Review 94

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. He runs H4X Labs.

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Oakland Asia Lean Video 313

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 12, 2012

This points to a fundamental disconnect between established companies and the customers they’re trying to reach. Executives from powerhouse advertisers like Walmart, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and others are pushing Facebook for access to more user data. I offer the following suggestions: Build your own customer communities.

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Social Media Media Marketing Software Review 164

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. If you want to scale faster you’ll need venture funding, both because of the anemic revenue, and because otherwise you can’t afford to advertise. Again, like shared hosting companies.) This is a hard slog.

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Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 19, 2017

By using CXM (customer experience management) software, it is possible to implement a total customer journey that takes them through purchasing decisions, price inquiries and the actual purchasing. Emails also provide an alternative communication channel that helps customers with larger inquiries.

Software Review 133

Software Review Technical Review Retention Channel 133

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses. Website Analysis.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. If you can harness the knowledge, natural enthusiasm, and peer influence of your very best customers — I call them “Rock Star” customers — they’ll market, sell, and help develop breakthrough products for your firm better than your internal resources can do, and often at a fraction of the cost.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. Oops - there went several precious weeks of development effort down the drain. If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. We finally settled on a $1.99

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 9, 2013

He adds: “All that you have to do is exceed your customers’ expectations, not by a huge margin, but just enough so that they’re pleasantly surprised. That’s where word-of-mouth advertising begins. When you hit that point, there’s a multiplier effect to the investment you make to secure the customer.

Customer 170

Customer Technical Review Florida Cofounder 170

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Guide to Evaluating Startup Ideas - Tony Wright dot com , May 27, 2010 A great developer I once worked with was kvetching at lunch one day. Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. Innovative. Disruptive. We get it! I Be specific. Here’s why.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2015

The) first thing was I wanted to be a land developer because I wanted to be my own builder. What did I know about land development? His first startup, built soon after the birth of his son, was advertising on trucks. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. I felt awful because I just quit my job.

Las Vegas 120

Las Vegas Entrepreneur Cofounder Nevada 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. Hacking for Conservation and Development at Duke followed.

Oakland 278

Oakland Lean SBIR Afghanistan 278

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.),

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

All the marketing materials, data sheets, advertising, press releases, trade shows, etc. Technically our positioning was correct, and with an infinite marketing budget (my back of the envelope calculations said $60M) and time, we might have made this technical fact ( QuickDraw acceleration) something a customer understood and cared about.

Silicon Valley 157

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Either way, you can use any marketing channel thats available to bring in new customers, including word of traditional advertising, SEO, SEM - wherever you can find prospects who are going to find your product addicting. Thats why eBay advertises on search engines, and Facebook doesnt. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in Customer Development. As another example, I could see which magazines are on people desks, and that tells me where to advertise.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 4, 2010

First to develop or patent an idea. In 1998 Goto.com , a small startup (later Overture, now part of Yahoo ! ), created the pay per click search engine and advertising system and demo’d it at the TED conference. Filed under: Customer Development , Market Types , Marketing. Product Pioneer. First to have a working model.

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Silicon Valley Differentiation United States Customer Development 322

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Topics have included “Leveraging Pinterest”, “Mobile Commerce”, and “Facebook Advertising”. Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Entrepreneurial Development Firms. Thoughtbot - Web application development and design. Raizlabs – Mobile Development.

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Agile software development. Customer development. For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought Id include a few links. For customer development, start with Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany or take a look at his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102