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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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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. And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” It’s an impressive portfolio.

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Customer Development is Not a Focus Group

Steve Blank

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 Validation - 33 Great Articles

SoCal CTO

In both cases, the answer was that the founder would go to find other ideas, turn those into paper descriptions and validate it with customers. Customer Validation 101. The Fallacy of Customer Development Hubris Versus Humility: The $15 billion Difference Less is More, More or Less Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?

Customer 227
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It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem

ConversionXL

This is a customer development problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.

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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.