Bootstrapping Business Model Customer Development Engineer 
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. Your product is designed with natural tripwires to trigger other pricing ( Freemium model ), or not (business model left as an exercise to your future self). Even bootstrapped businesses can make this work (e.g.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
OCTOBER 23, 2012
But all that investment in growth and sales force didn’t have a long-term payback, and the actual value of the product to small businesses wasn’t as high as claimed, even though the simplest of customer development reveals this fact (ask any restauranteur).
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Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 14, 2009
What matters is proving the viability of the company’s business model, what investors call “traction.&# Of course this is not at all true of many profitable small businesses, but they are not what I mean by startups.) This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. dave - glad somebody noticed.
Startup Lessons Learned
JUNE 5, 2009
I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. One way to conceive of our goal in an early-stage venture is to incrementally “fill in the blanks&# for the business model that we think will one day power our startup. The solution is to change our focus from outputs to inputs.
Startup Lessons Learned
APRIL 18, 2010
Myth: Lean Startups are small bootstrapped startups. What differentiates them is their disciplined approach to determining when to spend money: after the fundamental elements of the business model have been empirically validated. Myth: Lean Startups replace vision with data or customer feedback.
A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks
MARCH 11, 2014
They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. Edwin: Oh sorry, so the business model. Edwin: The business model is that the organizer has to pay. I think another thing you wanted to talk about was the whole keep bootstrapping or raise money question.
Startup Lessons Learned
AUGUST 8, 2009
In particular, we would cover customer development, continuous deployment, minimum viable product, and actionable metrics. I continue to work on additional programs and products for bootstrapped and angel-backed startups, as well as for enterprise and future entrepreneurs. I love the business model. Great idea.
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