Cost Customer Development Hiring SEM 
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 7, 2009
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.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 7, 2008
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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Startup Lessons Learned
NOVEMBER 7, 2008
We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. Dont worry about selecting particularly good keywords, if youre new to SEM.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 15, 2008
The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 2, 2008
We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 8, 2008
So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 30, 2008
If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh).
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