Customer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. How you execute Customer Development varies, depending on your type of business. In my book, “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” I use enterprise software as the business model example. Ash Maurya, the CEO of WiredReach, has extended my work [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 27 Comments »
Startups that are searching for a business model need to keep score differently than large companies that are executing a known business model. Yet most entrepreneurs and their VC’s make startups use financial models and spreadsheets that actually hinder their success. Here’s why. Managing the Business When I ran my startups our venture investors scheduled [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 40 Comments »
It’s been a year since I’ve been blogging. The 100 or so posts add up to about 300 pages of text. One of the downsides to a large number of blog posts is that older stories tend to get buried and hidden. Categories and indexes on the web pages aren’t quite the right metaphor [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | 13 Comments »
In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. You would think that would be enough to get wrong, but entrepreneurs and investors compound this problem by assuming that all startups grow and scale by executing the Revenue Plan. They [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Market Types | 11 Comments »
The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model, reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. In Discovery startups take all their hypotheses about the business model: product, market, customers, channel, etc. outside the building and test them [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Venture Capital | 39 Comments »
One of the hardest problems for engineers in founding roles in a startup is interacting with customers up close and personal. Over the years I’ve found the best way to learn to do this is by emulating empathy. The Problem I was having dinner in Palo Alto with some of my Stanford engineering students and [...]
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Filed under: Technology | 10 Comments »
Entrepreneurs and the early startup team all need to be motivated by a shared vision, passion and desire to build a large company. Yet it’s the company legends that live on. Fund Raising Our little startup was less than a year-old. We had been busy assembling our team and had just hired the last member [...]
Filed under: Family/Career | 16 Comments »
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