Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 1, 2013

Product development is stuck at that 90% mark, a key person leaves, and customers are talking but not buying. I challenge any startup to show me they have avoided all of these: One of the founders isn’t delivering. Besides, he is now more interested in designing the next product. The product is behind schedule.

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YoungUpstarts

MARCH 24, 2014

by Adam Root, founder and CTO of Hiplogiq. The same rule applies to product and app development. Launching a new product can be costly, but adding features to a successful existing product can be even more costly if the additions take away from your product’s unique focus. A DUI lawyer? Didn’t think so.

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Fractional CTO Product CTO Hire Merger 228

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. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

As the founder of Smartvu Ltd., This is why I like to include customers in product development and testing. I also like to be close with customer service finding out how the product is working and what problems the customers have. You must sell the most product. Try a lot of things.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 21, 2021

For entrepreneurs, effective networking is required to find investors, partners, and customers. Serious investors expect founders to have their homework done before the first interaction – documented executive summary, business plan, and financial model. Product development. Customer retention. Time management.

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Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 28, 2020

But for founders who do their homework, the cost of entry is lower and the opportunity is higher than ever. Excellent detailed resources are everywhere, including a classic book, “ The Startup Checklist ,” by serial entrepreneur and founder of the New York Angels, David S. Building a minimum viable product, with customer validation.

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YoungUpstarts

MAY 30, 2019

In 2013, I left a CTO job overseeing a 50-person product engineering team for the same job at a four-person startup. This learning experience left me with one seemingly obvious takeaway: The two trickiest variables of early product management are the “product” and the “management.”

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ConversionXL

JANUARY 18, 2022

Muun found a market need but failed to compete with bigger names that provided customers with authoritative content and resources. One neglected its positioning by failing to target the biggest pain point, and the other failed to build a brand that its customers could trust above the other major players.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. We didnt think wed able to compete with that.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

In the last decade, SaaS (Software as a Service) has become a very popular model for new software product development. The largest cost component of establishing a SaaS company is product development costs. This includes the design, development, launch, and enhancement of the SaaS application. .

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View from Seed

NOVEMBER 18, 2020

But ops & customer support is another 17-20% of revenue and arguably you couldn’t run the business if you took that away. Sales and marketing has been 30%+ basically forever, though undoubtedly Airbnb has enough brand recognition and loyal customers that if you turned off marketing spend then revenue would drop but not to zero.

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Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 14, 2015

“Scope creep” (or feature creep) is an insidious disease that kills more new business solutions than any other, especially high-tech ones, and yet most founders (who may be the cause) never even see it happening. The best product is one that is highly focused, and has the absolute minimum number of features to do the job.

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Technical Review Product Software Review Database 120

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 30, 2020

Over the years, we’ve worked with, and talked to thousands of founders just starting out. A collection of some of our greatest hits, and some new content, put into one helpful package for founders navigating building a company. The first guide we are releasing is around product. Getting Great Feedback from Customers.

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Early Stage Product Startup Hiring 308

Small Business Force

DECEMBER 12, 2013

Every entrepreneur wishes they were as prescient or creative as Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders, respectively of Apple, Amazon and Google. That they could accurately predict or (in Jobs' case) dictate customer needs. From the customer themselves! Think about it. And can I have a big DUH!

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Development Team Review Product Development Developer Customer 36

View from Seed

JULY 5, 2022

Founder: Connor Cash. Investors, customers, regulators, and all key stakeholders are demanding more transparent corporate sustainability disclosures. RH: Who are your customers? CC: Our customers are companies that are collecting, managing, and tracking their ESG data. . Get to know the founder. And your least?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about 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. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 22, 2008 Thoughts on scientific product development I enjoyed reading a post today from Laserlike (Mike Speiser), on Scientific product development. Keep split-testing, but keep this iron rule: if it doesnt change customer behavior, its not a feature.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building? How many are there? Can it scale?”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

The Equity Kicker

AUGUST 20, 2014

I’m reproducing in full here because it’s a great explanation of our solo-founder hypothesis and how we work more generally. Are you a solo founder with an idea? Snaptrip started as an idea, an excel spreadsheet and a passionate founder called Matt. —————————-.

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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. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

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ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. The most common mistake startups make is assuming they can operate the same way big companies do, and expect success with little to no feedback from potential customers. This is a customer development problem.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

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The Equity Kicker

MARCH 26, 2018

In our experience, structured customer development work is right up there amongst the most valuable things a founder can do in the early days of their startup. Once you have an idea that feels strong, it’s imperative to speak with customers about it. But good customer development is tough to do.

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Customer Framework Differentiation Customer Development 75

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite of a startup if you don’t hold any. Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. You can’t be an effective founder or in the C-suite if you don’t have any. I was a great marketer. Who are the payers?

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Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 19, 2013

“Scope creep” (or feature creep) is an insidious disease that kills more good startups than any other, especially high-tech ones, and yet most founders (who may be the cause) never even see it happening. This term refers to the penchant to add just one more feature to the product or service before first delivery, just because you can.

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Technical Review Startup Software Review Database 275

Steve Blank

MARCH 16, 2016

To most founders a startup is not a job, but a calling. But startups require money upfront for product development and later to scale. Founders can now access the largest pool of risk capital that ever existed –in the form of Private Equity (Angel Investors, family offices , Venture Capitalists (VC’s) and Hedge Funds.). (BTW,

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Liquidity Event Founder Liquidation Preference Venture Capital 120

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 24, 2018

Based on my experience, creating a new business is at least as difficult as creating an innovative solution, and it takes a knowledge of finance, operations, customers and the marketplace. If you don’t have all these interests and skills, even your most “disruptive” products will likely fail. Don’t try to be all things to all people.

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ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 30, 2021

A lot of work goes into starting a business, developing and launching products, and running the day-to-day operations, so marketing often gets put on the back burner. Buyer personas help establish your ideal customer. Fortunately, slogans are one aspect of your brand that’s easy to develop and change in the future.

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Developer Marketing Social Media Startup 159

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

And to today, when its major product is simply innovation. When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. A Day in the Life of A Founder For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. However, if the founder is still running the company, the last thing he wants is a company complacent with day-to-day execution.

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View from Seed

MARCH 24, 2021

At NextView Ventures we have written many pieces about venture capital — how to raise it, build your business, engage with investors, iterate your product, navigate expanding industries, etc. Rethinking the Standard Fundraising Deck “I’d make it crystal clear what your product actually does. VCs sure do love writing.

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Seed Stage Hiring IPO Analytics 177

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2020

Nand changed the culture of the JAIC, bringing in Silicon Valley tools for product development, product management and for the first time a culture that focused on UI/UX, MVPs and continuous integration and deployment. One product at a time wasn’t going to change the trajectory of the DOD. Nand Mulchandani.

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Artificial Inteligence Fractional CTO Technology CTO 388

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

by Steve Owens, Founder and CTO of Finish Line Product Development Services. Poor Product – 17%. Ignore Customers – 14%. Product Mis-Timed – 13%. There is no product, processes or history to guide decisions. Your distribution method will modify your product, etc.,

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit."

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Version One Ventures

MAY 3, 2023

But India is such a welcoming country that it only took a few weeks of preparation to fill a weeklong schedule with meetings – from a dinner arranged by Shiva with approximately 15 founders in Delhi to a talk about crypto at Builders Circle in Bangalore. group pic from meet-up w/ Delhi founders

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