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I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the CustomerDevelopment model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?
Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.
CustomerDevelopment is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not CustomerDevelopment.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customerdevelopment? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.
For example, if you are trying to determine viral coefficient (see Startup Metrics ), then the focus should be around those aspects of the MVP. CustomerDevelopment Notes I'm assuming founders are having customerdevelopment conversations. Quite often these things get old quickly.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 CustomerDevelopment Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customerdevelopment methodology.
I believe it is the best introduction to CustomerDevelopment you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of CustomerDevelopment and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customerdevelopment Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 23, 2009 Why vanity metrics are dangerous In a previous post, I defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics. In this post, Id like to talk about the perils of vanity metrics. My personal favorite vanity metrics is "hits."
Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. 2009 – Back to The Future The bad news is that since the bubble most VC firms haven’t made a profit. So what’s left?
I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. This is a customerdevelopment problem. So What is CustomerDevelopment? The core idea behind customerdevelopment is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses.
And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. We were constantly creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on end-user purchases. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. I couldn’t care less about those.
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. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics. August 3, 2009 10:52 AM Chris Hopf said.
The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See CustomerDevelopment Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the CustomerDevelopment process.
Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 22, 2009 Pivot, dont jump to a new vision In a lean startup , instead of being organized around traditional functional departments, we use a cross-functional problem team and solution team. Each has its own iterative process: customerdevelopment and agile development respectively.
Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics.
Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customerdevelopment process. Labels: customerdevelopment , split-test 7comments: Editor said.
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 customerdevelopment is in order? Labels: customerdevelopment , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. May 6, 2009 3:03 PM Ivan Acosta-Rubio said.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 1, 2009 The Steve Jobs method Image via CrunchBase Its been a long time since I did a post that was primarily a link to another blog with commentary, but I came across something today that I really want to share. August 1, 2009 7:39 AM Ravi Mohan said. August 1, 2009 8:11 AM Michael said.
In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. January 2, 2009 8:54 AM mancjew said. January 2, 2009 8:57 AM Abbas said. Abbas February 22, 2009 3:33 PM cwillu said. Would love to get in touch.
When we looked at the color graphics board market, our competitors had defined the market as one measured by technical metrics: screen resolution, number of bits of color, screen refresh rates, acceleration, etc. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that what we had to do was to tell our story around one key metric performance ?
January 18, 2009 8:22 AM Dan Khan said. Cheers, -Dan January 18, 2009 9:04 PM Ivo said. January 20, 2009 1:12 PM Anonymoussaid. April 12, 2009 12:28 AM kenshin said. April 21, 2009 4:51 PM Geethan said. April 26, 2009 8:40 PM RubyFocus Groups said. September 27, 2009 3:31 PM codercofounder said.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. February 21, 2009 12:10 AM Harold Fowler said. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said. February 21, 2009 12:26 PM Anonymoussaid. February 21, 2009 3:08 PM SCC said.
Because five whys kept turning up a few key metrics that were hard to set static thresholds for, we even had a dynamic prediction algorithm that would make forecasts based on past data, and fire alerts if the metric ever went out of its normal bounds. February 11, 2009 8:05 AM Anonymoussaid.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 3, 2009 Employees should be masters of their own time Every startup should have a culture of learning. In order to give people the data they need to apply the strategy, we were very open with our company metrics, making all reports generally available and easy to run. Dont even go there.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 15, 2009 Why Continuous Deployment? June 15, 2009 7:41 AM William Pietri said. June 15, 2009 8:24 AM Stevesaid. One thing you seem to be treating lightly is how to use continuous development in business systems. Corporate customers seem to prefer regular but distinct releases.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? Every board meeting, the metrics of success change. Time-to-complete-a-sale is not a bad metric for validated learning at this stage. Great post! Great post!
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. July 13, 2009 7:38 AM George said.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Embrace technical debt Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. Very much appreciate the suggested solutions (Five Why's, split testing etc) July 29, 2009 6:24 AM Kevin Gadd said. July 29, 2009 6:57 AM Heiner Wolf said.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 2, 2009 How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis In the lean startup workshops , we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 15comments: Anonymoussaid. July 3, 2009 3:11 AM Eric Williamson said.
on May 26, 2009 at 6:18 am Said: [.] Reply Dmitriy , on May 26, 2009 at 6:54 pm Said: I would like to humbly suggest banning the term “vertical&# altogether. Reply steveblank11 , on May 26, 2009 at 7:57 pm Said: Dmitry, I think your comment makes my point. What is it that’s unique about the market I’m in?
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. one more thought, where were the code reviews?
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 24, 2009 The metrics and levers of engagement, presentation on Engagement Loops for Facebook Developer Garage SF Ill be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. March 25, 2009 9:16 AM Jesse Farmer said. March 25, 2009 9:19 AM Eric said.
And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in CustomerDevelopment. It’s one of the subtle distinctions that at times gets lost in the process.
Those rates gave us a map that told us a lot about our customers; insights that proved stable even when the company grew orders of magnitude bigger. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customerdevelopment to online marketing. Thank yo u January 3, 2009 4:07 PM BillSeitz said.
Labels: continuous deployment , product development , Test-driven development 8comments: Nasser Ghanemzadeh said. February 14, 2009 11:12 PM Eric said. Thanks for stopping by, Eric February 27, 2009 9:07 PM dan said. May 15, 2009 1:17 AM neocoder said. August 31, 2009 9:17 PM Anonymoussaid.
the version that would facilitate the investment of real money) was planned for late-2009. the version that would facilitate the investment of real money) was planned for late-2009. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? The result? The result?
Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009 - Business of Software Blog , May 4, 2010 "In the old days, getting customers was easy. They’re deep into CustomerDevelopment ,” he said. it’s about measuring online influence and I’m big on metrics as a key element of business planning; 2.) You could just outspend.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, April 9, 2009 Built to learn Its been an exhilarating ride since the Web 2.0 Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customerdevelopment , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, March 13, 2009 Dont launch Heres a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? Do some CustomerDevelopment instead. Know what the success metrics are for the launch. March 13, 2009 1:50 PM dan simard said. Help you raise money.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 10, 2009 Continuous deployment and continuous learning At long last, some of the actual implementers of the advanced systems we built at IMVU for rapid deployment and rapid response are starting to write about it. February 10, 2009 10:14 PM Anonymoussaid. I am not a developer.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.
The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup? Startup Visa update ► February (5) Kiwi lean startup + Australia next Why diversity matters (the meritocracy business) Beware of Vanity Metrics (for Harvard Business Rev. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.
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