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Seven Reasons Why Customer Reference Programs Fail

YoungUpstarts

It must cross boundaries, working cooperatively with other divisions in your business such as sales, marketing, social media, PR, product development, and the like. Too often salespeople may “hoard” their prize references, fencing them off from big opportunities to promote or close business for you.

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Vision versus Hallucination – Founders and Pivots

Steve Blank

We’re building the wrong product!” Tossing their agile development process and at times their entire business model in the air, the company would go into fire-drill mode and engineering would start working on whatever his latest insight was. he’d declare. “We We got to pivot now.” Find a Brainstorm Buddy.

Founder 316
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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Building Great Founding Teams

Steve Blank

(However, in some industries such as life sciences, founders may be tenured professors who are not going to give up their faculty positions, so they often become the head of a startup’s scientific advisory board, but aren’t part of the founding team.). A couple of caveats about founders with “ideas.”

Cofounder 335
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[Excerpt] Earlyvangelists: The Most Important Customers of All

ReadWriteStart

They can be relied on for feedback and initial sales; they’ll tell others about the product and spread the word that the vision is real. Moreover, they can be potential advisory board candidates. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) First. Use the Business Model Canvas as the Customer Discovery Scorecard.

Customer 119
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90 Things I've Learned From Founding 4 Technology Companies

betashop.com

I firmly believe that in this age where the product development life-cycle is so short and user feedback comes so quickly, you will know within a year whether you are focusing on a worthwhile one thing. But, you can iterate and iterate on features, but you cannot iterate your way to a business model.

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Startup Resources

www.vccafe.com

Simple online team or personal kanban board. Great for visualizing work of product development. Executive / Advisory Board Compensation. VentureHacks on Startup Advisory Boards â?? broken vc model. Business Culture. Business Model Canvas. Business plan. Kanbanery â??