… Wufoo's 29,561% Return: Kevin Hale on Customer Development
> Etsy's [ Backend] Transition: From Startup to Superpower
> Meebo's Pivot to Acquisition: Seth Sternberg's Pivot Metrics
> Under the Hood of ModCloth: CTO on Agile Development
> David BEATS the Goliath: The true story of . CO's rise to fame
> Tips from an Anti-Social Founder : Dharmesh Shah on culture
PLUS:
> 8:30am Mimosa Meetup…
- High Scalability: Hot Scalability Links for March 19, 2010
- Global Nerdy: Mobile Developer News Roundup for Wednesday, May 23, 2012
- danieltenner.com: Why you should go to Geeknrolla
- Blog | The Working Group: Our first #nerdlearn-aversary
- Engine Yard Developer Blog: March Madness!
- Lee Munroe: SXSW Day 4
…since the beginning. They self-published The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development in April of 2010
From the outset, they were both practitioners and mentors, urging entrepreneurs not to follow a paint-by-numbers approach, but rather to think lean: fast, agile and continuously learning. Over the last two years they've traveled around the world speaking, advising, and teaching Lean Startup. The Lean Entrepreneur is an important addition to the growing library of principles …
- » Product Launch Blog: Lean Startup Machine: Smarter Entrepreneurs in 55 Hours
- New Relic: Why Lean Startups Love New Relic
- Obie Fernandez: Since I finally got my LaunchRock Invite...
- the evolving ultrasaurus: beyond agile development
- Trevor Turk: Links for 9-19-10
- Positive Incline: Fire-and-forget: what it means, some remedies
Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process
Lean startups embrace continuous deployment, where new code gets pushed to production daily, if not multiple times a day. From that approach come a number of follow-up approaches, including:
Testing in actual production environments instead of mock production environments
Getting user feedback from observing user behaviour in the production environment instead of soliciting opinions from users …
- DevChix: RailsBridge Open Workshop Project
- JJinuxLand: Jobs: Looking for People to Work With Me
- Opscode Blog: Rackspace Launches Services Business for OpenStack Cloud Deployments
- Kalzumeus Software: Lessons Learned At Business of Software 2010
- Viget.com Blogs: Regarding Recent Events
- : Web 2.0 Expo NYC Wrap Up
…Ash Maurya and the authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development for Tech Startups .
Learn How Google Works in Gory Detail - Quite an infographic on how Google generates north of $20B per year.
Why Startups Fail: An Analysis of Post-Mortems - The top 20 causes of startup failure based on 32 post-mortems.
Todd Wyder and I are giving a talk on Customer Development at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business next Tuesday, as part of The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship's New Venture Challenge program.
It's nice to see Customer Development and Lean Startup principles make their way into business school curricula, and thanks to the Polsky Center's efforts, there are some very good things coming out of Hyde Park.
entity_424660 …
I want to do some exploration of customer validation, the second phase of Customer Development. I think its an area that there isn't as much information on as customer discovery. And some of the stuff about customer validation is pretty hazy. So, I thought I would do a few postings on it and see where it goes.
Customer validation
Starting with the end in mind, let's talk about the exit criteria for customer validation. Steve Blank asks:
Do you have a proven sales roadmap? Org char? Influence map?
- Kalzumeus Software: Lessons Learned At Business of Software 2010
- Software by Rob: Highlights from the 2009 Business of Software Conference
- Lessons Learned: Business ecology and the four customer currencies
Side note: the book "Four Steps to the Epiphany" is the Customer Development bible, but it's ironically a slow read. Very dense. I'd recommend Ash Maruya's " Customer Development Checklist for My Web Startup", Part 1 and Part 2 .
Other people frequently make the mistake of trying to get their startup going "cheaply" by hiring night-and-weekenders. The product development process inevitably drags on, and sometimes never …
- BenCurtis.com: Facebook Rails Integration with OAuth2
- Wynn Netherland: CSS Metaframeworks - King of all @media
- casperfabricius.com: Hosting a Spree webshop on Heroku
- RubyLearning Blog: A Free Course on Sinatra
- DevInterface Blog: The top 20 plugins to create a Rails application
- SD Ruby Podcast: Episode 075: Heroku
Customer Development / Lean Startup adoption: We are all collectively getting smarter at a scary rate.
99.7% of all companies are <500 employees and employ half of the people in the country. In contrast, a scalable startup is designed to grow big and it typically needs risk capital. (Note: venture capital was originally called "adventure capital.")
Your job as an entrepreneur is to search for a scalable and repeatable business model. Then build a business around it. Founders …
- Lessons Learned: The Lean Startup Intensive at Web 2.0 Expo SF (May 3, 2010)
- Kalzumeus Software: Bingo Card Creator Year In Review 2009
- : Web 2.0 Expo NYC Wrap Up
On Customer Development
You need to read Steven Gary Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany
The ideas in this book led to the feeling in venture circles that customer development is a good thing
If you're starting a company that sells things to people, read it!
Leadership
Seth Godin says this of leadership: It's about painting a picture of the future for other people and then leading them to it
Back in 2004, things went terribly wrong
I partnered …
- Unspace Blog: The Fruits of Unspace Labour
- : ByteClub.tv
- casperfabricius.com: Hosting a Spree webshop on Heroku
- PaulBarry.com: ExtJS On Rails
- ronin coder: Never do today what you can put off 'til tomorrow
- Running & Coding: Why I love Ruby on Rails and what should be said on it's performance, part 1
Steve Blank talks about the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there. From the Lean Startup Circle talk he gave on Nov 19.
This is a must watch, and you might as well check out the slides and relevant links .