article thumbnail

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business.

Startup Lessons Learned

For a little while, the team can resort to the last defense of entrepreneurs in trouble: the promised hockey-stick. One thing that is often overlooked about the hockey-stick growth shape: its most distinctive characteristic is the long, flat part. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: Validated learning about customers

Startup Lessons Learned

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

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

article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: A hierarchy of pitches

Startup Lessons Learned

Most important slide: hockey stick Micro-scale results Key questions: who is the customer, and how do you know? Most important slide: lessons learned Working product Key questions: what does the product do? . Most important slide: valuation Promising results Key questions: can you monetize that traffic? (or Expo SF (May.

article thumbnail

Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

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. Market Type also affects the market size as well as how you launch the product into the market.

article thumbnail

CXL Live 2019 Recap: Takeaways from Every Speaker

ConversionXL

Optimization is by nature agile: CRO yields new data for the team to prove that whatever the organization did was good or bad. It’s a wave—the agile Tsunami. The reality is that it’s hockey stick growth—you have to spend tons of money before you see any results (and then the results are exponential). You can’t see it.)