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Driving Corporate Innovation: Design Thinking vs. Customer Development

Steve Blank

Two methods, Design Thinking and Customer Development (the core of the Lean Startup) provide the tactical day-to-day process of how to turn ideas into products. . While they both emphasize getting out of the building and taking to customers, they’re not the same. .

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Customer Development for Web Startups

Steve Blank

Customer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. How you execute Customer Development varies, depending on your type of business. Ash Maurya , the CEO of WiredReach, has extended my work by building a model of Customer Development for Web Startups.

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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit). Startups with huge burn rates – building leases, staff, PR and advertising – ran out of money. Lean makes sense when capital is scarce and when you need to keep burn rates low.

Lean 335
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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

While he correctly understood how to frame his hypotheses with a business model canvas, and he was doing a good job in customer development – the third component of Lean is using Agile Development to rapidly and iteratively build incrementally better versions of the product – in the form of minimal viable products (MVP’s).

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It Must Be A Marketing Problem

Steve Blank

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

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Which Fundraising Round Should You Skip?

View from Seed

As a first time founder, having a few million dollars in the bank after a successful seed raise may seem like a huge amount of capital, and it’s easy to lose discipline around your burn rate.

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