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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.
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.
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.
Venture Capitalists on your board developed the expertise to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits.
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. Welcome to the Internet bubble.) See part one for the first time it happened. Good stuff too.
It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. It’s what my textbook on CustomerDevelopment describes. I was an idiot.
Think of the Microprocessor, Personal Computer, Internet, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Google, the iPhone. CustomerDevelopment There was nothing wrong about Rocket Science having a vision radically different than the conventional wisdom. Founders need to validate their vision in front of customers early and often.
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. No internet, no blogs, no books [.] Thanks Steve, Great insight.
Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. It was fun watching it happen.
A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? This was a company that had sold 15,000 graphics boards and monitors to consumers.
Later he would leave for a few years to start the Computing Directorate at the National Science Foundation , help spec what became the Internet and then come back and run Ardent’s engineering.) A few days later Gordon became a founder.
Anybody with a sense of how the Internet works should have known that they couldn’t commit such open fraud on this scale and expect to get away with it. Keep them coming Reply William , on August 24, 2009 at 12:00 pm Said: I doubt this is TechCrunch’s first encounter with PR people lying. Instead, this is a culture clash.
This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development.
Tell Me How to Find You But having benchmarks in hand that showed us as the winner did us no good unless all our potential customers could see them. Our first thought was to spread the news ourselves, perhaps in a press release or a “white paper,” (remember this was pre-Internet.)
Our VP of Business Development had no problems getting meetings and fund raising was easy. The Digital Dream Team Way before the Internet phenomenon, we had created “Rocket Science the brand ” that was much bigger in size and importance than Rocket Science the company.
Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customerdevelopment for a meatier problem. So that means stuff like thinking about what a business model might be, it does mean customerdevelopment. So I have a question for you, Jason.
This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to CustomerDevelopment to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.
And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. CustomerDevelopment.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand. They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.
Meyler Capital is taking the analytical rigor of modern internet marketing and applying it to fund marketing. The VC Software Stack — the Untouched Vertical. Other VCs use Klout * to identify relevant influencers who can evangelize their ideas and Contently * or Social Native (HOF Capital company) to create relevant content.
This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. In an existing or resegmented market, this may include branding and product line extensions. In most markets, “first mover advantage&# is illusorily; fast followers often win.
We already have some competitors in the vertical and while there is no point in trying to hide the actual idea, there are differences in the way we implement stuff that can get us an advantage over the competition. >> There are some other serious reasons why we dont want to go public right now.
For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. I normally recommend you just store this directory on your master database, but you could use a standalone vertical shard (or even a key-based partition!) This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases.
It could be fixed by refactoring the code itself, or by partitioning the data horizontally or vertically, or by adding additional capacity at the point of the bottleneck, or by shaping end-user demand, or even by removing the feature itself. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to CustomerDevelopment ► June (3) What is a startup?
And thanks to the radical transparency enabled by the internet, the quality of these proposals is actually constantly rising, to the point that it’s almost impossible to judge the quality of the final product – because all the proposals look polished and professional, even the terrible ones.
Now I guess it’s “never bet against the Internet,&# with all that implies. Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/12/ardent-3-supercomputer-porn – view page – cached + CustomerDevelopment Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?
Reply steveblank , on September 16, 2009 at 7:00 pm said: Greg, The Google Group “Lean Startup Circle&# at [link] is a wonderful repository of CustomerDevelopment/Lean Startup success and failure. This video should be the gold standard in explaining contract terms. It’s more reference material. Thus, these pages.
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