Trading emails with a startup CEO building an iPhone app, I asked him why potential customers would buy his product. In response he sent me a competitive analysis. It looked like every competitive analysis I had done for 20 years, (ok maybe better.) And it made me sad. Looking at the spreadsheet, I realized that [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types | 29 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 »
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 »
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 »
The most important early customers for your startup usually turn out to be quite different from who you think they’re going to be. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “Serial Communications Controller” (SCC). As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Zilog | Tagged: Customer Development, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 9 Comments »
I did a fireside chat with a few entrepreneurs interested in Customer Development at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the venture firm behind such Skype, Baidu, Overture, …. Ravi Belani was nice enough to set it up, blog about the talk and film it. The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 3 Comments »
Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame and the author of the Lessons Learned blog joined me at Startup2Startup for a joint Customer Development talk. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. The Customer Development talk can be seen here. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The slides are here. If you’ve [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types | Tagged: Customer Development, Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Startups, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 6 Comments »
With insight into our customers, the first part of our strategy was to understand what kind of positioning problem we had. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market? No, not really. Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 20 Comments »
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