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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.

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Lessons Learned: The four kinds of work, and how to get them done.

Startup Lessons Learned

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Datablindness

Startup Lessons Learned

You constantly assess the situation, looking for hazards and timing your movements carefully to get across safely. Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. Imagine you are crossing the street.

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Lessons Learned: Product development leverage

Startup Lessons Learned

The idea of leverage is simple: for every ounce of effort your product development team puts into your product, find ways to magnify that effort by getting many other people to invest along with you. For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop. Its a key lean startup concept.

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Lessons Learned: The ABCDEF's of conducting a technical interview

Startup Lessons Learned

The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. Were there to serve customers direclty, as well as all of the other functions of the company.

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Lessons Learned: The hacker's lament

Startup Lessons Learned

As the company grows, hes the go-to person for almost everything technical, and so hes very much in demand. Sometimes, a great hacker has the potential to grow into the CTO of a company, and in those cases all you need is an outside mentor who can work with them to develop those skills. He throws off volumes of code, and it works.