Remove Customer Development Remove Demo Remove Metrics
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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

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.

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It’s Time to Play Moneyball: The Investment Readiness Level

Steve Blank

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. And we can offer investors metrics to play Moneyball – with the Investment Readiness Level. We think we can do better.

Oakland 330
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The Innovation Stack: How to make innovation programs deliver more than coffee cups

Steve Blank

Most importantly we now have a better idea of how to build innovation programs that will deliver products and services, not just demos. However, without any measurable milestones to show evidence of the evolution of what the team has learned about validity of the problem, customer needs, pivots, etc.,

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How Investors Make Better Decisions: The Investment Readiness Level

Steve Blank

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. Other than “I’ll know it when I see it”, there’s no formal way for an investor to assess project maturity or quantify risks.

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Introduction to Growth Hacking for Startups

VC Cafe

1) It all starts from the Growth Hacking Funnel - in the early stages, startups should not just focus on top/bottom line metric like unique users and revenue. Customer Development Labs recently shared a great experiment on using mTurk to interview 100 customers in 4 hours for less than $200. Distribution Hacks.

API 167
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Create Structure out of the Gate and You’ll Thank Yourself Later

Feld Thoughts

Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. No updates, screen comps, or metrics have been publicly shared yet. Soundbites from potential customers are encouraging. Eventually early product demos start happening but they’re rough and the product looks very alpha.

Burn Rate 152
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The Class That Changed the Way Entrepreneurship is Taught

Steve Blank

A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). Third, the tools for customer discovery (videos, sample experiments, etc.)

Lean 436