Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Luckily (or maybe because we were in Silicon Valley where there was a domain expert for everything) there was a very smart consultant in the retail computer space, Seymour Merrin, who preached about the importance of packaging. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Dont worry about selecting particularly good keywords, if youre new to SEM. If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? What is customer development? I used to use $.05,

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. IMVU was a top-1000 website in the world, with millions of customers and making millions of dollars without getting any significant press coverage. In fact, we often felt frustrated when new startups with a fraction of our success got terrific write-ups in Silicon Valley-centric venues.

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