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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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Should Your Startup Custom Develop a Site From Scratch?

ReadWriteStart

There are dozens of free website builders that make it easy for any entrepreneur to create a new website from a template, even with no website building experience – but it may be better to custom develop a site from scratch. . What are the advantages of custom development, and is it the right move for every startup? .

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development

Steve Blank

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. What metrics do we use to see if we learned enough in Customer Discovery ? Customer Development is unhelpful here.

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

Steve Blank

Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.

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2 Challenges of Startup Customer Development & How to Get Great Feedback Instead

View from Seed

Customer development” has become its own skill and body of knowledge, and there are some crucial nuances to understand up front before beginning your customer dev discussions. But for a true seed-stage company or for folks just thinking about companies to start or products to build, I think surveys are generally terrible.

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It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem

ConversionXL

Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses.