Remove Advisory Board Remove Customer Development Remove Product Development
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Seven Reasons Why Customer Reference Programs Fail

YoungUpstarts

It must cross boundaries, working cooperatively with other divisions in your business such as sales, marketing, social media, PR, product development, and the like. These may include references, referrals, testimonials, serving on advisory boards, and participating in your customer communities, he explains.

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Building Great Founding Teams

Steve Blank

(However, in some industries such as life sciences, founders may be tenured professors who are not going to give up their faculty positions, so they often become the head of a startup’s scientific advisory board, but aren’t part of the founding team.). Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture.

Cofounder 335
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Vision versus Hallucination – Founders and Pivots

Steve Blank

He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Filed under: Customer Development.

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A real Customer Advisory Board

Startup Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

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[Excerpt] Earlyvangelists: The Most Important Customers of All

ReadWriteStart

They can be relied on for feedback and initial sales; they’ll tell others about the product and spread the word that the vision is real. Moreover, they can be potential advisory board candidates. Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) First. MVPs for Web/Mobile Are Different.

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Embrace technical debt

Startup Lessons Learned

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Pivot, don't jump to a new vision

Startup Lessons Learned

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. IMVU had a roughly two-month-long development cycle. Each cycle was punctuated by a meeting of our Business Advisory Board (BAB). Heres what it looked like. This is an exciting kind of change, usually.