Remove Customer Development Remove Lean Remove Metrics Remove Vertical
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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. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

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Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

In future posts I’ll describe 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. shoes in order to deduce possible competitors’ moves and anticipate customer needs.

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SuperMac War Story 5: Strategy versus Relentless Tactical.

Steve Blank

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics.

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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

Unfortunately, this content-less decision-making process is inhibiting the ability of media companies to develop interesting new content at the very time when this supposed expertise should serve as their one true competitive advantage. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300.

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He's Only in Field Service

Steve Blank

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

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SuperMac War Story 4: Repositioning SuperMac – “Market Type” at.

Steve Blank

When we looked at the color graphics board market, our competitors had defined the market as one measured by technical metrics: screen resolution, number of bits of color, screen refresh rates, acceleration, etc. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that what we had to do was to tell our story around one key metric performance ?