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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe more specifically how this model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Because it isn’t until after first customer ship that a startup discovers that their initial hypotheses were simply wrong (i.e. before you ship.

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Lessons Learned: Customer Development Engineering

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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How To Find the Right Co-Founders?

Steve Blank

Activities define the unique expertise your company needs to deliver the value proposition, customers, channels, customer relationships and/or revenue. (If For example, if you’re building a mobile app, then the key activities are: app software development, user interface design and demand creation skills.

Cofounder 335
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I-Corps @ NIH – Pivoting the Curriculum

Steve Blank

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Customer Segments change over time. I-Corps @ NIH Lecture Order Details.

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Lessons Learned in Diagnostics

Steve Blank

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter : Customer Discovery in Digital Health.

Lean 244
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Why Build, Measure, Learn – isn’t just throwing things against the wall to see if they work

Steve Blank

Version 1 was built without customer feedback, and before version 1 was complete work had already started on version 2 so it took till version 3 before the customer was really heard (e.g. Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s. Microsoft Windows 3.0).

Lean 120
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SuperMac War Story 5: Strategy versus Relentless Tactical.

Steve Blank

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.