Nivi · March 3rd, 2009
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 to the Epiphany, Steve is a “retired entrepreneur who… has been in 8 startups in operational roles from CEO to VP of Marketing… These startups resulted in five IPO’s, and three very deep craters.” Marc Andreessen calls Steve “one of the most strategic thinkers you will find on the topic of starting high-tech companies… buy [his book], read it, keep it under your pillow and absorb it via osmosis.”
The course
In a nutshell, customer development teaches you how to sell a product before you build it (or while you build it). Unlike a lot of advice from entrepreneurs, customer development isn’t based on Steve’s experience in a single market — it’s based on his experience in a broad set of markets. His companies have made semiconductors, workstations, enterprise software, supercomputers, computer peripherals, military intelligence systems, and video games.
Customer development also works on the consumer Internet. In 2005, Steve funded IMVU on the condition that its founders take his class. We recently wrote about the results of the founders’ experience in How IMVU learned its way to $10M a year.
Each lecture is two hours long. Steve’s war stories alone are worth the price of admission. Let me know if you like these lectures and I will post the rest.
Class 1: Introduction
Audio: Class 1: Introduction (mp3)
(Note: I only recorded the last 20 minutes of this class.)
Slides: Customer Development 1: Introduction (pdf)
Syllabus
The syllabus lists the readings for each class. The primary text is Four Steps to the Epiphany. Buy it.
Document: Customer Development Syllabus (pdf)
Topics Customer Development
Nivi,
This is great. We are big fans of Steve/IMVU and the customer development process. We are trying our best to follow this process at our startup and we are succeeding to some extent. We got 45 subscriptions (@$40/month) to our service in the 2 weeks that our consumer facing premium service was live. Our product had a bare minimum feature set but we know that there is a demand there and we are now rapidly iterating to make sure that we deliver more features that customers want and that will make our premium service more valuable.
So, yes—any and ALL information from Steve/Eric/IMVU would be much appreciated.
Also—see this blog post about another customer development focused CEO/startup- Greg Gianforte (CEO, RightNow) that influenced us: http://nrao.posterous.com/greg-gianforte-ceo-of-rightnow
I agree with Nik. We’re huge fans of Steve, Eric, and IMVU as well, and are trying to incorporate this thinking into our MMO project.
We’re pushing out a very bare-bones version so that we can get closer to our users and learn from them.
More lectures would be fantastic!!
Customer Development: The Definitive Resource | JonBischke.com // Mar 20, 2009 at 11:29 pm
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