Steve Blank: “What I began to realize is that we teach entrepreneurship like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. So the first heuristic I want to offer is that — even in this class — there really is no common ‘these rules work’ for all vertical markets and industries.” Listen [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Customer Development'
We teach entrepreneurship like every vertical market has the same set of rules
April 8th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Advisors, Customer Development
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It's very easy to underprice your product
April 1st, 2009 · 4 Comments · Customer Development
What’s the right price for your product? According to Steve Blank, it’s apparently $0. And it’s also $1 million. What? Listen to this wonderful story to learn how Steve uses these two prices to create a bounding box around the highest price customers will pay for a product. And see why he thinks “It’s very [...]
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Sell it before you build it
March 28th, 2009 · 8 Comments · Customer Development
Fliggo does it right: Fliggo Pro is a minimum viable product in action. MVPs reduce time to market. It’s a good sign when people sign up to be notified. And if nobody signs up, you build the next iteration and see if that’s the minimum viable product. How would you modify this MVP to collect [...]
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Customer Development, Classes 3 and 4
March 23rd, 2009 · Comments Off · Customer Development
We’ve gotten a lot of requests to keep posting Steve Blank‘s customer development course. Thanks for the feedback, we’re glad you like the course! Here’s the audio and slides from classes three and four. And new students can catch up on Class 1 and Class 2. Steve’s lectures usually have two parts: a group discussion [...]
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What is the minimum viable product?
March 23rd, 2009 · 44 Comments · Customer Development, Interview, Podcast
Eric Ries and I recently sat down to talk about minimum viable products: the product with just the necessary features to get money and feedback from early adopters. The minimum viable product (MVP) is often an ad on Google. Or a PowerPoint slide. Or a dialog box. Or a landing page. You can often build [...]
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The king of customer development starts a blog (and tweets too)
March 20th, 2009 · 2 Comments · Customer Development, Resources
Steve Blank, the king of customer development, has started a blog at steveblank.com. And he’s on Twitter too: @sgblank. Steve is one of the great startup mentors of all time and he is using his blog to share 30 years of Silicon Valley war stories. Start at the beginning, and read every word he writes. [...]
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Don't launch? But the New York Times is on the phone!
March 19th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Customer Development, Launch
Before you continue, read Eric Ries’ excellent Don’t launch, where he questions the assumptions behind most marketing launches. If you ask most entrepreneurs why they want to launch, you’ll get an answer like, “So people find out about my product — are you stupid?” But a thoughtful founder who read Eric’s article recently asked me, [...]
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The Venture Hacks Podcast
March 6th, 2009 · Comments Off · Customer Development, Podcast
A lot of people have asked us to post the rest of Steve Blank’s customer development classes. Thanks for the feedback — we’re glad you like the course and we’ll post more classes over time. Podcast-lovers can also receive Steve’s course as a podcast. Just use your podcasting client to subscribe to our feed: feeds.venturehacks.com/venturehacks [...]
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Take a course from the king of customer development
March 3rd, 2009 · 4 Comments · Customer Development
If you want to learn customer development, you can take Steve Blank’s course at Stanford, Berkeley, or Columbia. Or you can take his course right here on Venture Hacks. I’m taking the course right now and I’ve posted the audio and slides from the first lecture below. Steve Blank According to his book, Four Steps [...]
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How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year
February 24th, 2009 · 3 Comments · Case Studies, Customer Development, Lean, Presentations
“Lean startups are built from the ground up for learning about customers.” – Eric Ries I recently sat in on Eric Ries’ presentation on lean startups at Berkeley. The slides and audio are below. The presentation is about one hour long and it is gold. Audio: The Lean Startup (mp3) Slides: The Lean Startup (pdf) [...]
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