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Customer Development in Japan: a History Lesson

Steve Blank

I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. Back in 1990’s, I was working for one of the leading sogo shohsa (trading company) in Japan, building data communications startups. Evangelizing Customer Development in Japan.

Japan 305
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It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem

ConversionXL

This is a customer development problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.

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10,000 Startups – Startup Weekend Next

Steve Blank

The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual. More importantly, it makes no demands of you to stand and deliver your weekly customer development progress in front of your peers.

Startup 335
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2 Challenges of Startup Customer Development & How to Get Great Feedback Instead

View from Seed

The obvious answer we all give (and receive) in the startup community is to talk to people. Customer development” has become its own skill and body of knowledge, and there are some crucial nuances to understand up front before beginning your customer dev discussions. But how do you go about figuring out what people want?

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A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Steve Blank

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. The Adventure Begins.

Lean 307
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Ardent War Story 5: The Best Marketers Are Engineers

Steve Blank

Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems. I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product.

Engineer 224
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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. The formation of the military/industrial/university relationships during the Cold War and the relationship between Stanford and the intelligence community in particular, went on untold and out of sight.