Remove Burn Rate Remove Customer Development Remove Hiring
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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

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.

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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

While he correctly understood how to frame his hypotheses with a business model canvas, and he was doing a good job in customer development – the third component of Lean is using Agile Development to rapidly and iteratively build incrementally better versions of the product – in the form of minimal viable products (MVP’s).

Cofounder 336
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It Must Be A Marketing Problem

Steve Blank

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

Burn Rate 252
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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

He just hired Meg Whitman. Given the stock market was buying “the story and vision” of anything internet, inflated expectations were more important than traditional metrics like customers, growth, revenue, or heaven forbid, profits. Startups with huge burn rates – building leases, staff, PR and advertising – ran out of money.

Lean 335
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Are Business Plans Still Necessary?

Both Sides of the Table

Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever.

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Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups

Steve Blank

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 263
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The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part V: Happy 100th Birthday.

Steve Blank

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. In ten years, from the early 1950′s to the early 1960′s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000. to do that.