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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

So what’s wrong the product development model? The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.)

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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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The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part X: Stanford Crosses the.

Steve Blank

Although this reseearch would lead to the development of the Backward Wave Oscillator and Traveling Wave Tube for military applications, Stanford was building tubes and circuits not entire systems. doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.)

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

ConversionXL

This is a customer development problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.

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China Startups – The Gold Rush and Fire Extinguishers (Part 5 of 5)

Steve Blank

But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley. The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Perhaps it’s the weather.

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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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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types.

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