Expert insights. Personalized for you.
This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. MORE
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. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned. MORE
The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Although the large firms made the headlines, startups also pivoted. MORE
Top 3 Ways to Fail at Customer Development: Fail #1 - Talk talk talk Fail #2 - ??????? ???? Customer Development Entrepreneurship Lean startupFail #3 - Being Gullible. MORE
A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Modev MVP Conference and the Lean+Agile DC Conference about using a bootstrapped Customer Development approach to pursuing a new product idea in an existing company. MORE
Most startups fail. The product or website (be it software, e-commerce, or a service) might be awesome , but if it puts itself in front of the wrong market, or packages itself so the right market can’t figure out why it’s awesome, the startup will fail. MORE
The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. But customers didn’t agree. Customer Development Education. MORE
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. Every startup has some methodology for product development, launch and life-cycle management. So what’s wrong the product development model? Product Development Diagram 1. MORE
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. Here’s hoping they soon tackle Customer Validation. MORE
This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. MORE
It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Today every business organization from startup to large company uses the words “business model.” Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. MORE
A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Modev MVP Conference and the Lean+Agile DC Conference about using a bootstrapped Customer Development approach to pursuing a new product idea in an existing company. MORE
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. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.” MORE
Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We’ve been a startup for the past two years or so and we’ve come to a critical point on this crazy roller coaster ride. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us? MORE
The obvious answer we all give (and receive) in the startup community is to talk to people. 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. With that in the back of our minds, let’s dive into a few of those crucial first-step nuances as you look to gain traction and hold successful customer development conversations. MORE
I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. The sum of solving for both unknown customer needs and unknown features became the Lean Startup. MORE
I think customer feedback comes in a very unstructured manner, hence it is difficult to apply an algorithm on it. to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. MORE
Tenoch Esparza is the co-founder of Sensory Percussion, a next-generation electronic drum startup. Nothing beats meeting face-to-face with a customer. Yet, asking the same questions of potential customers over and over again is tough. MORE
Customer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. How you execute Customer Development varies, depending on your type of business. Go read both of his posts on Discovery and Validation for web startups. MORE
Startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but interestingly we see that companies are not larger versions of startups. While they both emphasize getting out of the building and taking to customers, they’re not the same. MORE
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." Very few startups fail for lack of technology. MORE
Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. MORE
If you’re a startup trying to disrupt an existing business you need to read The Fixer by Bradley Tusk and Regulatory Hacking by Evan Burfield. regulation happens on three levels: federal laws that are applicable across the country are developed by Federal government in Washington. MORE
Today we are announcing the biggest entrepreneurial program ever launched – Startup Weekend Next. Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups. The result – Startup Weekend Next. MORE
In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. My public talk at Columbia University was part of their Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Startup lecture series. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development. MORE
Have you thought about using Lean Startup to improve your sales process? The post B2B Sales: A Lean Startup Approach appeared first on GrasshopperHerder.com. Customer Development Lean Startup B2B Evaluative Market Experiment Startup ToolThe founder of Shipitwise reveals how he used lean principles to improve B2B sales. MORE
It’s surprising how easy it is to ask bad questions during customer development. As well as extra detail it provides a host of practical examples that make it easier to do high quality customer development. How will you find your next/first set of customers? MORE
The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here. MORE
Artist is @Agentfin : Customer Development in a Diagram « Steve Blank. Lean Startup Steve BlankFrom Steve Blank. MORE
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. MORE
At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. We spent two days of analyzing and exploring their customer discovery visits just completed across South America, Africa and Asia. We used what they learned to plan their next steps for additional Discovery, and ultimately Customer Validation. MORE
Customer Development Lean LaunchPadWith a terrific crew of instructors, TA’s, and mentors, we successfully concluded Session 1 of our Hacking 4 Recovery summer series – with 20 teams sharing their final presentations last night. Slides for these presentations are in this folder , and we will be editing and sharing videos of each presentation shortly. Alivia – Telemedicine service bringing healthcare to middle income people in Peru. MORE
Learning how questions actually work can give you fresh insight into the customer discovery process. The post How Asking Works: A Crash Course in Customer Discovery Questions appeared first on GrasshopperHerder.com. Interviewing strangers is a science as much as an art. MORE
Customer development is hard. Customer Development Lean StartupsIt takes work to get it right and you'll always be improving your technique. Here are a few tips I like to keep in my head while I'm getting out of the building. MORE
The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here. MORE
When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here: A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. MORE
Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. One of the specific requests from our chip architects was to find out whether customers would want the chip to have data stored as big-endian or little-endian. MORE
The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there. MORE
Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development. I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO ( now available for pre-ordering at Amazon ). This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company , by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf. It doesn’t get into the last two steps at all, Customer Creation and Company Building. MORE
The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? MORE
The Customer Development talk can be seen here. If you’ve never seen Eric’s Lean Startup presentation, take a few minutes to at least watch his part. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. MORE
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 ? MORE
Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. MORE
He has been writing, talking, and teaching about business model development since retiring from active entrepreneurship -- he also has a great blog. Here is a talk he gave recently to a conference called the Start-up Lessons Learned Conference (it runs about 44 minutes, but is well worth the time): Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv (Thanks to John Wark for passing along this video). MORE
Grasshopper Herder
JULY 17, 2012
Customer development is hard. Customer Development Lean StartupsIt takes work to get it right and you'll always be improving your technique. Here are a few tips I like to keep in my head while I'm getting out of the building.
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 25, 2010
Customer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. How you execute Customer Development varies, depending on your type of business. Go read both of his posts on Discovery and Validation for web startups.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Steve Blank
MARCH 29, 2012
When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here: A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development.
Steve Blank
JULY 30, 2014
Startups are not smaller versions of large companies, but interestingly we see that companies are not larger versions of startups. While they both emphasize getting out of the building and taking to customers, they’re not the same.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 13, 2012
The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. But customers didn’t agree. Customer Development Education.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 25, 2010
It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Today every business organization from startup to large company uses the words “business model.” Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 23, 2009
The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.
View from Seed
OCTOBER 22, 2015
The obvious answer we all give (and receive) in the startup community is to talk to people. 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. With that in the back of our minds, let’s dive into a few of those crucial first-step nuances as you look to gain traction and hold successful customer development conversations.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 5, 2009
Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail.
Grasshopper Herder
SEPTEMBER 15, 2011
Top 3 Ways to Fail at Customer Development: Fail #1 - Talk talk talk Fail #2 - ??????? ???? Customer Development Entrepreneurship Lean startupFail #3 - Being Gullible.
Steve Blank
JULY 7, 2009
I think customer feedback comes in a very unstructured manner, hence it is difficult to apply an algorithm on it. to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 15, 2010
In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. My public talk at Columbia University was part of their Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Startup lecture series. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development.
Steve Blank
APRIL 29, 2010
I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. The sum of solving for both unknown customer needs and unknown features became the Lean Startup.
Steve Blank
MAY 1, 2009
The Customer Development talk can be seen here. If you’ve never seen Eric’s Lean Startup presentation, take a few minutes to at least watch his part. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 17, 2009
This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 16, 2009
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 ?
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. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 10, 2009
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. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.”
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 30, 2009
Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. One of the specific requests from our chip architects was to find out whether customers would want the chip to have data stored as big-endian or little-endian.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 3, 2009
This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers.
Startup Lessons Learned
JULY 5, 2010
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. Here’s hoping they soon tackle Customer Validation.
The Equity Kicker
MARCH 3, 2014
It’s surprising how easy it is to ask bad questions during customer development. As well as extra detail it provides a host of practical examples that make it easier to do high quality customer development. How will you find your next/first set of customers?
Street Smart Product Manager
JUNE 2, 2015
A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Modev MVP Conference and the Lean+Agile DC Conference about using a bootstrapped Customer Development approach to pursuing a new product idea in an existing company.
The Next Web
AUGUST 2, 2014
Tenoch Esparza is the co-founder of Sensory Percussion, a next-generation electronic drum startup. Nothing beats meeting face-to-face with a customer. Yet, asking the same questions of potential customers over and over again is tough.
Steve Blank
AUGUST 23, 2010
At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. We spent two days of analyzing and exploring their customer discovery visits just completed across South America, Africa and Asia. We used what they learned to plan their next steps for additional Discovery, and ultimately Customer Validation.
Steve Blank
AUGUST 31, 2009
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. Every startup has some methodology for product development, launch and life-cycle management. So what’s wrong the product development model? Product Development Diagram 1.
Startup Lessons Learned
NOVEMBER 8, 2008
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." Very few startups fail for lack of technology.
Street Smart Product Manager
JUNE 2, 2015
A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Modev MVP Conference and the Lean+Agile DC Conference about using a bootstrapped Customer Development approach to pursuing a new product idea in an existing company.
ConversionXL
SEPTEMBER 6, 2013
Most startups fail. The product or website (be it software, e-commerce, or a service) might be awesome , but if it puts itself in front of the wrong market, or packages itself so the right market can’t figure out why it’s awesome, the startup will fail.
Steve Blank
JULY 14, 2020
Customer Development Lean LaunchPadWith a terrific crew of instructors, TA’s, and mentors, we successfully concluded Session 1 of our Hacking 4 Recovery summer series – with 20 teams sharing their final presentations last night. Slides for these presentations are in this folder , and we will be editing and sharing videos of each presentation shortly. Alivia – Telemedicine service bringing healthcare to middle income people in Peru.
Steve Blank
MAY 6, 2013
The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here.
OnlyOnce
JUNE 20, 2013
Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development. I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO ( now available for pre-ordering at Amazon ). This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company , by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf. It doesn’t get into the last two steps at all, Customer Creation and Company Building.
Startup Lessons Learned
SEPTEMBER 7, 2008
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development.
Campus Entrepreneurship
JANUARY 25, 2013
Artist is @Agentfin : Customer Development in a Diagram « Steve Blank. Lean Startup Steve BlankFrom Steve Blank.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 5, 2018
Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan.
Grasshopper Herder
MAY 21, 2019
Learning how questions actually work can give you fresh insight into the customer discovery process. The post How Asking Works: A Crash Course in Customer Discovery Questions appeared first on GrasshopperHerder.com. Interviewing strangers is a science as much as an art.
Steve Blank
JUNE 23, 2020
The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Although the large firms made the headlines, startups also pivoted.
The Entrepreneurial Mind
MAY 12, 2010
He has been writing, talking, and teaching about business model development since retiring from active entrepreneurship -- he also has a great blog. Here is a talk he gave recently to a conference called the Start-up Lessons Learned Conference (it runs about 44 minutes, but is well worth the time): Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv (Thanks to John Wark for passing along this video).
Steve Blank
MAY 6, 2013
The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here.
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 9, 2018
If you’re a startup trying to disrupt an existing business you need to read The Fixer by Bradley Tusk and Regulatory Hacking by Evan Burfield. regulation happens on three levels: federal laws that are applicable across the country are developed by Federal government in Washington.
Steve Blank
APRIL 7, 2020
The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building?
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 30, 2012
Today we are announcing the biggest entrepreneurial program ever launched – Startup Weekend Next. Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups. The result – Startup Weekend Next.
Grasshopper Herder
JANUARY 29, 2018
Have you thought about using Lean Startup to improve your sales process? The post B2B Sales: A Lean Startup Approach appeared first on GrasshopperHerder.com. Customer Development Lean Startup B2B Evaluative Market Experiment Startup ToolThe founder of Shipitwise reveals how he used lean principles to improve B2B sales.
131 
Let's personalize your content