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
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
Top 3 Ways to Fail at Customer Development: Fail #1 - Talk talk talk Fail #2 - ??????? ???? Customer Development Entrepreneurship Lean startupFail #3 - Being Gullible. 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
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
Startup Marketing Blog – By Sean Ellis Unlocking Startup Growth By Sean Ellis of 12in6 May 18th 09 Free Customer Development Help – Survey.io I’m excited to announce a project that I’ve been working on with KISSmetrics called Survey.io , which provides startups with a free and easy way to prepare, distribute and analyze an initial customer development survey. Posted in Acquiring Customers , Competitors , Customer Development. 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
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
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 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
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
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Bruce’s customer knew this and was counting on Bruce and the DriveCam team to know this as well. MORE
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? I am excited about participating in Eric Ries’ Lean Startup conference tomorrow! MORE
I had a brief email conversation with a startup founder struggling with how to tackle customer development in marketplace business models. Customer Development does not equal User Acquisition. Customer development is a method for discovering, testing and validating user acquisition and conversion methods. To put it another way, the business doesn’t exist without product, but doesn’t succeed without customers. MORE
Most customers tolerate bugs. Most customers tolerate products with missing features that they need (or think they need!) Most customers tolerate the quirks and hiccups that come with new technology and software. Customers can be quite forgiving. Even the feeling or inkling of being ignored can set customers into a rage; and worse, have them looking for alternative solutions to yours. And use those customer interactions to learn from them. 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
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? The key to effective conversations is in developing the conversation around your objectives for the discussion. MORE
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Post-Launch Customer Development These are tricky waters for the reasons described above. MORE
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Services Marketing Help Downloads Contact Log In Customer Development Funnel Image v.4 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
Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti The Real Reason We Don’t Do Customer Development: Fear June 9, 2010 | View Comments It’s hard to argue against going through the Customer Development Process (CDP) when building your startup. MORE
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? ralxz's Blogs said: Customer Development Slide [link] [.] 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 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
As painful and frustrating as it is, many successful product people I’ve … Continue reading Using Customer Development To Create The Business Case For Your New Product. The post Using Customer Development To Create The Business Case For Your New Product appeared first on Street Smart Product Manager. Many of my product help calls are from folks frustrated with being able to pursue a new product in an existing company. 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
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Reply Leave a Reply Cancel Reply ← My VentureBeat Marketing and Customer Development Articles Is My Poem Lean? MORE
I haven’t weighed in on Customer Development thoughts for several hours, so it’s about time. Interesting series of tweets in the last several days got me thinking about the biases we bring to Lean Startup Customer Development practices. 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
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? ralxz's Blogs said: Updated Customer Development Image [link] [.] Reply Startup D.O.A 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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
AUGUST 18, 2010
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?
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
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.
Instigator Blog
OCTOBER 27, 2011
Most customers tolerate bugs. Most customers tolerate products with missing features that they need (or think they need!) Most customers tolerate the quirks and hiccups that come with new technology and software. Customers can be quite forgiving. Even the feeling or inkling of being ignored can set customers into a rage; and worse, have them looking for alternative solutions to yours. And use those customer interactions to learn from them.
Market by Numbers
FEBRUARY 23, 2011
I haven’t weighed in on Customer Development thoughts for several hours, so it’s about time. Interesting series of tweets in the last several days got me thinking about the biases we bring to Lean Startup Customer Development practices.
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 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.
Market by Numbers
SEPTEMBER 13, 2010
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Post-Launch Customer Development These are tricky waters for the reasons described above.
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 ?
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.
Market by Numbers
DECEMBER 8, 2009
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? ralxz's Blogs said: Customer Development Slide [link] [.]
Market by Numbers
JANUARY 12, 2011
I had a brief email conversation with a startup founder struggling with how to tackle customer development in marketplace business models. Customer Development does not equal User Acquisition. Customer development is a method for discovering, testing and validating user acquisition and conversion methods. To put it another way, the business doesn’t exist without product, but doesn’t succeed without customers.
Market by Numbers
SEPTEMBER 2, 2010
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? The key to effective conversations is in developing the conversation around your objectives for the discussion.
Market by Numbers
APRIL 22, 2010
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? I am excited about participating in Eric Ries’ Lean Startup conference tomorrow!
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.”
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
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
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.
Vinicius Vacanti
JUNE 9, 2010
Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti The Real Reason We Don’t Do Customer Development: Fear June 9, 2010 | View Comments It’s hard to argue against going through the Customer Development Process (CDP) when building your startup.
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.
Street Smart Product Manager
SEPTEMBER 28, 2014
As painful and frustrating as it is, many successful product people I’ve … Continue reading Using Customer Development To Create The Business Case For Your New Product. The post Using Customer Development To Create The Business Case For Your New Product appeared first on Street Smart Product Manager. Many of my product help calls are from folks frustrated with being able to pursue a new product in an existing company.
Market by Numbers
FEBRUARY 3, 2010
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Reply Leave a Reply Cancel Reply ← My VentureBeat Marketing and Customer Development Articles Is My Poem Lean?
Market by Numbers
JANUARY 13, 2010
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? ralxz's Blogs said: Updated Customer Development Image [link] [.] Reply Startup D.O.A
Market by Numbers
APRIL 29, 2010
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Bruce’s customer knew this and was counting on Bruce and the DriveCam team to know this as well.
Market by Numbers
JUNE 14, 2010
Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Services Marketing Help Downloads Contact Log In Customer Development Funnel Image v.4
Startup Marketing Blog
MAY 18, 2009
Startup Marketing Blog – By Sean Ellis Unlocking Startup Growth By Sean Ellis of 12in6 May 18th 09 Free Customer Development Help – Survey.io I’m excited to announce a project that I’ve been working on with KISSmetrics called Survey.io , which provides startups with a free and easy way to prepare, distribute and analyze an initial customer development survey. Posted in Acquiring Customers , Competitors , Customer Development.
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.
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?
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