Startup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Here’s an example in a direct sales channel. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch A VC asked me to have lunch with the CEO of a startup building cloud-based enterprise software. (Boy did I feel like Rip [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 14 Comments »
Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. They called back laughing and the invitation disappeared. At best I think business plan competitions [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 44 Comments »
This week I’m at the California Coastal Commission hearing in Ventura California wearing my other hat as a public official for the State of California. After the hearing I drove up to Santa Barbara to give a talk to a Lean Startup Meetup. The talk, “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” summarized my current thinking about [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, California Coastal Commission, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 17 Comments »
Startups are the search to find order in chaos. Steve Blank At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. But I think [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 36 Comments »
No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke I was catching up with an ex-graduate student at Café Borrone, my favorite coffee place in Menlo Park. This was the second of three “office hours” I was holding that morning for ex students. He and his co-founder were both [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 54 Comments »
The Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship course at Stanford taught undergraduates how to take a technical idea and turn it into a profitable and scalable company. By getting out of the building on a team project, the class helped students viscerally understand that a startup is a search for a profitable business model. Students formed teams, [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 2 Comments »
Back from a family humanitarian trip/vacation to one of the last bastions of Communism where “marketing” isn’t even a profession and entrepreneurship is a crime. The irony is that the “Revolutionary Square” in all these Communist countries will be the the first place the McDonald’s go when the system collapses. ——————- In my last post I described my [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 10 Comments »
One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship, an introduction to building a scalable startup. While the class is open to everyone at the University, we want to teach science and engineering undergraduates how they can take a technical idea and turn it into [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 26 Comments »
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 »
Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. But what information to collect? Only 57 Questions Yesterday I got an email from an ex-student lamenting that only 2% of their selected early testers responded to their on-line survey. The survey said in part: The survey [...]
Filed under: Customer Development Manifesto | 21 Comments »
The Lean Startup Circle is a Google discussion group (anyone can join) centered on Customer Development/Lean Startup strategy, tactics and implementation. They were kind enough to sponsor a meet-up in San Francisco. The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries, was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture, [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 7 Comments »
One of the benefits of teaching is that it forces me to get smarter. I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. Dancing Around the Question Union Square Ventures was [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Market Types | 20 Comments »
I joined the board of Cafepress.com when it was a startup. It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. But Cafepress’s most memorable moment was when the founders used a “Lessons Learned” VC pitch to raise their second round of [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | 13 Comments »
Getting “funded” is the holy grail for most entrepreneurs. Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. This post describes how companies using the Customer [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | 24 Comments »
At an entrepreneurs panel last week questions from the audience made me realize that the phrase “Lean Startup” was being confused with “Cheap Startup.” 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 [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 8 Comments »
The first four posts of the Customer Development Manifesto described the failures of the Product Development model. 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 product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Most [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 14 Comments »
This series of posts of the “Customer Development Manifesto” describes how the failures of the Product Development model for sales and marketing led to the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Market Types | Tagged: Customer Development | 10 Comments »
This post is part 3 of the “Customer Development Manifesto” series and makes more sense if you read part 1 and part 2. This post describes how following the traditional product development 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 [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 11 Comments »
This post makes more sense if you read part 1 of the Customer Development Manifesto. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 6 Comments »
This post makes more sense if you read the previous post – The Leading Cause of Startup Death: The Product Development Diagram. After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 25 Comments »
“Customer Development” was born four years earlier and 200 miles away on Sandhill Road. 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. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | Tagged: Steve Blank, Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Early Stage Startup | 1 Comment »
I realized that traditional ways to think about startups – have an idea, raise some money, do product development, go through an alpha test, beta test and first customer ship was the canonical model of how entrepreneurs thought about early stage ventures. This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Steve Blank, Customer Development, Product Development Model, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Early Stage Startup | 4 Comments »
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