Remove Demand Remove Distribution Remove Product Development Remove Vertical
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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

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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Why the Future of Tesla May Depend on Knowing What Happened to Billy Durant

Steve Blank

When Sloan arrived at GM in 1920 he realized that the traditional centralized management structures organized by function (sales, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing) were a poor fit for managing GM’s diverse product lines. Within each brand there were several models at different price points. The next year, 1910, trouble hit.

Michigan 268
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Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups

Steve Blank

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. Lean Startups aren’t Cheap Startups « Steve Blank (tags: startup product-management strategy) [.]

Lean 244
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Vertical Markets 4: Putting it All Together « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 122
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5 Content Marketing Strategies for Niche B2B Industries

ConversionXL

Content, including articles, guides, and case studies, can still generate prospects and customers consistently—you just need to approach distribution from a different angle. In reality, content can still be used to generate leads and customers—it just requires a different strategy to create and distribute content in the right way.

B2B 133
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Marching through quicksand

Startup Lessons Learned

One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. Mostly it is the time and expense required to create the means of distribution for that industry. It’s just taking some longer than others.

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The Leading Cause of Startup Death – Part 1: The Product.

Steve Blank

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.