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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.
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. And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” It’s an impressive portfolio.
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.
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 CustomerDevelopment Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.
At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about CustomerDevelopment at my ranch on the California Coast. CustomerDevelopment Without Agile Engineering Is A Plan For Failure. Lessons Learned.
For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of CustomerDevelopment , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The CustomerDevelopment process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.
Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or CustomerDevelopment there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customerdevelopment. Filed under: CustomerDevelopment.
Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the CustomerDevelopment Methodology. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.
PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about CustomerDevelopment and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). You can get away with effective behavior in a large company.
CustomerDevelopment ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. CustomerDevelopment) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left his office or before a meeting ended.
Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) CustomerDevelopment (98) CustomerDevelopment Manifesto (..)
CustomerDevelopment We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Good stuff too.
The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or CustomerDevelopment. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Your results may vary.
Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « CustomerDevelopment Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) CustomerDevelopment Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.
Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) CustomerDevelopment (98) CustomerDevelopment Manifesto (..)
Crammed into Silicon Valley along with millions of people around the San Francisco Bay it’s hard to fathom that 15 air miles away was a stretch of California coast that was still rural. At the end of two days I realized, This was the first full weekend I had taken off since I had moved to California 3 years ago. How did I miss that?
CustomerDevelopment There was nothing wrong about Rocket Science having a vision radically different than the conventional wisdom. CustomerDevelopment says having a vision, faith and a set of hypotheses are a normal part of the startup experience. The mistake isn’t having a vision and taking risks.
I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F.
New strategic direction in companies with loyal customers have different consequences then when you had no customers Acquiring new customers are a lot more expensive that converting existing ones.
CustomerDevelopment/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on CustomerDevelopment describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.
Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? The other thing it helps clarify is that even at work, it’s the relationships that matter most (collegues, customers, partners, etc). The Adventure of a Lifetime.
However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a CustomerDevelopment process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. You’re not joining a big company.
The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.
Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , Marketing , SuperMac , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , SuperMac « Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions Gravity Will be Turned Off » 17 Responses EricS , on May 11, 2009 at 11:05 am Said: I loved my Spigot. It was fun watching it happen.
Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) CustomerDevelopment (98) CustomerDevelopment Manifesto (..)
Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. He and his wife Gwen would found the Computer Museum, first in the lobby of DEC headquarters, then in Boston (and now as the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.) The response from across the country? We’re building a supercomputer.”
The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the CustomerDevelopment process are you on? CustomerDevelopment and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.
This year, with the kids grown, their choice was to fly up from Southern California and spend the holidays at our ranch. So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, CustomerDevelopment, Lean Startups, etc. California, where even the rabbits are bigger than life!
Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Startups , Early Stage Startup , Tips for Startups « The Curse of a New Building Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1 » 33 Responses William , on May 18, 2009 at 5:44 am Said: Heh.
TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to CustomerDevelopment are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of CustomerDevelopment and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.
I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.”
If you are a practitioner of CustomerDevelopment, ESL was doing it before most us were born. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard.
Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks.
But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customerdevelopment process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. For example, complex new semiconductor architectures, (i.e.
A partner allows me the flexibility to miss a session or two (my job as a California Coastal Commissioner meets three days every month up and down the coast of California.) Having a teaching partner makes life a lot easier and the class improves.
I know that this all seems obvious now with the movements started by Steven Blank ( Four Steps of Epiphany ) with the whole CustomerDevelopment processes / Lean Startup movements also popularized by people like Eric Ries. And he gave them all early access to our prototypes for reaction. Back then it seemed foreign.
This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ), CustomerDevelopment and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.
The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard CustomerDevelopment lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of CustomerDevelopment, where we are today, and where does CustomerDevelopment go, and how you can help get it there.
My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. My first job out of RPI was as an engineer on the EF-111, an electronic counter measures laden derivative of the original F-111 swing-wing fighter / bomber. Had not yet heard of Silicon Valley at the time, but the siren call was already sounding.
Reply steveblank , on March 28, 2009 at 7:27 am Said: Denis, Over time the blogs tagged under the “customerdevelopment&# category will build up a narrative of illustrative stories of how customerdevelopment evolved in practice. What part of this blog should I read if I am also reading the book?
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