article thumbnail

Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development

Steve Blank

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

article thumbnail

A real Customer Advisory Board

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&#

Engineer 198
article thumbnail

The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs

www.instigatorblog.com

The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs Tweet When a startup receives financing it will need to setup a Board of Directors. The Board probably existed beforehand, but was made up only of the founders. Mark Macleod spells it out beautifully in his post on Advisory Boards. Why wouldn’t you?

article thumbnail

Seven Reasons Why Customer Reference Programs Fail

YoungUpstarts

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ Harnessing the power of references and referrals seems like an obvious win. What could make more sense than to leverage the enthusiasm of happy customers to convince buyers that they need your products and services?

article thumbnail

Your Product is Not Their Problem

Steve Blank

The conversation got interesting when I asked, “How are you going to describe the product to potential customers in the concrete industry?” Do you know what if any of the features you mentioned actually matter to a potential customer?” Ask customers how they solve the problem today. There was silence for a moment.

Product 429
article thumbnail

Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 32: Evangelos Simoudis and Ashok Srivastava

Steve Blank

A thought leader in the area of big data analytics, social media, optimization, machine learning, and data mining, he also served as a Venture Advisor focusing on big-data analytics at Trident Capital , and was on the advisory board of several startups. . Filed under: Customer Development. ” We certainly did.