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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.
Other advisors provided marketing with industry-specific advice in our initial vertical markets (computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, finite element analysis, and petroleum engineering). Some of these advisors from the academic community would work with our of VP of Engineering and help us solve specific technical problems.
Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the CustomerDevelopment Methodology. Companies specializing in components and systems that operated in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum sprouted faster than fruit trees in the valley orchards.
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.
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.
“And, oh by the way, can you write the manuals for the operators while you’re at it.&# As I poured over the system schematics, I figured out how to put together a course to teach system theory, operations and maintenance. Are You Single?
Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.
We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” Let me know what you think.
But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.
But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. 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.
No one was actually quite that good, but some VCs had “golden guts” for these kinds of operating issues. 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. “Oh Oh yes, company X, they’re having problem 343.
It wasn’t until I found the extremely obscure Lanchester Strategy for market share that I realized that these ratios had their basis in operations research and the Lanchester’s Laws.) Our company’s graphics boards were designed to speed up a key part of the Macintosh graphics operating system called QuickDraw.
Reply bjorn , on March 23, 2009 at 5:18 pm Said: these stories really livened up the whole concept of “customer discovery&# for me. It reminded me of “earlier days&# , when I was just starting out in running business operations for startups. i have your book, but stopped at the 4th chapter.
If you are a practitioner of CustomerDevelopment, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Stanford records showed that his group received more funding than any other and I assumed it was for construction of these operational systems. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.
All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. Radar engineers had observed if you cut a strip of aluminum foil to 1/2 the wavelength of a radar transmitter and throw it in front of the radars antenna, the radar signal would reflect perfectly. making nothing but jammers to put on our bombers.
These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Much like our digital PR offering, we started with a lean operation: We used Google Sheets to manage content operations across all accounts, along with dashboards that each client had access to. Choose to expand vertically or horizontally.
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.
And when I wasn’t reading, I was also teaching operations which gave me a pretty good understanding of what we were looking for on the other side. But when the targets lit up, the music and chatter would stop, and the communications would get very professional.
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. (In
Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?
Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)
Navy and the CIA were the primary collectors of tactical and operational ELINT on the Soviet PVO Strany Air Defense system. ELINT Tasking The ELINT program sought answers to operational questions like: What was the Radar Order of Battle a penetrating bomber would face? During the 1950′s, the U.S. The NSA owned COMINT collection.)
Now the Soviets had first hand knowledge of how their air defense systems would work against the nuclear armed B-52G and H models in an operational environment. All as an integral part of the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan – our war-fighting plan to destroy the Soviet Union. 23 to Ann Arbor when the leaves turned in the fall.
In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. Totem is an operating system that makes investors smarter by helping them leverage their knowledge, relationships & insights.
My ideas about CustomerDevelopment started evolving around these concepts. However, I think if I had understood the basics of CustomerDevelopment I might have done 5-6 startups rather than 8 to get to retirement. When I moderated my behavior it was when they were my startups.) I looked at my kids and never went back.
The Beginnings – “Vacuum Tube Valley&# Ecosystem circa 1950 From its founding in 1946 Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) did basic research into vacuum tubes that could operate at microwave frequencies. The research was funded and paid for by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and later by the Air Force and Army.
As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. Do the right thing.
In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customerdevelopment. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. No one was confused after that.
But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. Reply CustomerDevelopment Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Ownership and Teamwork not turf. True? .&#
Have they moved to their forward operating bases in the Artic?) Also seeking to learn more about the Soviet Union’s offensive weapon systems , the CIA wanted intelligence to help them understand: What type of strategic bombers did the Soviets have? How many did they have? How would they reach the U.S.? How would we know if they were coming?
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. >> Illegal for them to operate trucks. Unfortunately I can only talk about the stuff related to the idea itself.
is a tool that helps you edge into customerdevelopment. It’s a free tool put together by Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah as a way for product owners to easily survey their customers using pre-written questions. This is great news not only for the future of our marketing, but for our product development. Photo by Eleaf.
For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. A given customer would have an entity URL that looked like this: customer://1234 Somewhere in your API, you have a way to access data about a given customer. Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation. to store it.
Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customerdevelopment and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. The same principles operate in living as in business. A VERY nice office. Are his costs in control?
Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of the Cray-1 , supercomputers were defined as the fastest vector-processing computer , one in which a single instruction performed operations on an array rather than a single number. Cray’s first customers were the U.S.
founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , Teaching. A match made in heaven? Not exactly.
founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , Teaching. CustomerDevelopment Teaching' Not exactly.
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