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For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.
by Steve Owens, Founder and CTO of Finish Line ProductDevelopment Services. The lean start-up movement has been based on a single insight – which the purpose of a start-up is to discover a business model that works. Reducing product turn time. The Lean Start-Up Environment. Extending the runway.
After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the productdevelopment model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the productdevelopment model?
Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. be prepared to be the most lean business in the sector (which is only possible where economy of scale does not create huge entry barriers). We’ll talk about how to reduce risk in each type of market in the next post.
This post describes how following the traditional productdevelopment can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.
It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. Your presentation doesn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development.
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 Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Take your typical scalability bottleneck.
In this scheme, all of the data related to a specific feature of a product are stored on the same machines. For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases. Key-based partitioning. to store it.
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) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)
When I reviewed a recent productdevelopment book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. Is that a lot? Is that good?
Two conditions that do matter to your startup’s out-year viability are the cost and length of its productdevelopment cycle. Startup founders counting the days until break-even or actively seeking outside capital must focus on streamlining their development cycles. Stay Lean and Low.
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) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)
Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of productdevelopment and acquiring early customers. And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of productdevelopment and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.
Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.
They couldn’t keep up with the fast productdevelopment times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. Convergent Technologies was one of those OEM suppliers.
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) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)
This productdevelopment diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. That’s in stark contrast to the traditional ProductDevelopment Model where it’s expected a customer is already there and waiting and it’s simply a matter of [.] familiar with Customer Development you should be.
Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.
My two cents is that a business plan is the single place to collect your thinking about about your: business model, distribution channel, demand creation plan, financial assumptions, and customer and productdevelopment plan. If you’re text averse like i am, try to diagram these key items and then write-up the diagrams.
In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.
Improve the product. Lisa Marino of RockYou , a leading developer of social games and advertising solutions for social media, is focused on building a great team with more gaming DNA to improve the quality of the games it publishes: Make RockYou the place talent wants to be. Internalize culture and values. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
This post describes how the traditional productdevelopment model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The Use of a ProductDevelopment Model to Measure Sales Using the productdevelopment diagram for startup sales activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature.
This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from ProductDevelopment to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The ProductDevelopment Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.
This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for productdevelopment activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.
In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for productdevelopment activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Market Type also affects the market size as well as how you launch the product into the market.
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) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)
Eighty some pages later I realized that a) I had some great war stories as a good marketeer and failed CEO, b) I’d have to pay my wife and kids to read them, c) the three of them were probably the entire total available market, and d) when I looked at what I had done and what other entrepreneurs had done at their startups, that there was a pattern.
Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to productdevelopment. I call this process “Customer Development,” a sibling to “ProductDevelopment,” and each and every startup that succeeds recapitulates it, knowingly or not.
1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth. Lean marketing. Still, it’s become one of our most profitable acquisition channels, and more importantly an excellent way to test new customer verticals and target markets. Apr-15: Head of Marketing (growth team).
It is interesting to note that some advocates of lean management and accounting (including Waddell and Bodek in *The Rebirth of American Industry*) have a strong dislike of Sloan/Brown management cost accounting.
In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be productdevelopment and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and productdevelopment moves to a supporting role. Who’s on the Sharp End?
Undoubtedly, there will be detractors who believe many products are simply features on top of foundational models. But builders who see AI as the driving force behind productdevelopment and GTM strategy will actually create new markets and experiences that never existed before.
AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of productdevelopment Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.
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