article thumbnail

Should Your Startup Custom Develop a Site From Scratch?

ReadWriteStart

If you want your startup to stand a chance of achieving brand visibility and attracting new customers, you need to have a website. The majority of modern consumers will consult the web before making a purchase or working with a corporate partner; if your website isn’t there, they’re simply going to turn to one of your competitors. .

article thumbnail

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?

Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

How To Build a Web Startup – Lean LaunchPad Edition

Steve Blank

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. One of the problems they run into is building a web site. and Balsamiq and throwing together a web site.

Lean 333
article thumbnail

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. Why is it only alarming now?

article thumbnail

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development

Startup Lessons Learned

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can easily take from it whatever makes sense for your business, and leave the rest. I think theyve succeeded.

article thumbnail

Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

While he correctly understood how to frame his hypotheses with a business model canvas, and he was doing a good job in customer development – the third component of Lean is using Agile Development to rapidly and iteratively build incrementally better versions of the product – in the form of minimal viable products (MVP’s).

Cofounder 336
article thumbnail

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.