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Lessons Learned: What is customer development?

  • “In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” Most likely, your business plan is loaded with opinions and guesses, sprinkled with a dash of vision and hope. Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you don't have to give up on your dream. We just want you to get out of the building, and start finding out whether your dream is a vision or a delusion.
  • Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified. We don't just abandon the vision of the company at every turn. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders' belief.
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21 Mar 09

How to build companies that matter - O'Reilly Radar

  • My experience is that startups need to be built from the ground up for learning about customers and what they will pay for. That means an obsessive focus on finding out "is our company vision really the path to a brave new world, or just a delusion?"

  • Read the stories of successful startups and, if the founders are willing to be honest, you will see this pattern over and over again. They started out as digital cash for PDAs, but evolved into online payments for eBay. They started building BASIC interpreters, but evolved into the world's largest operating systems monopoly. They were shocked to discover their online games company was actually a photo-sharing site.



    Each of these companies were fortunate to have enough time, resources, and patience to endure the multiple iterations it took to find a successful product and market. The premise of the lean startup is simple: if we can reduce the time between these major iterations, we can increase the odds of success.

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03 Mar 09

Derek Powazek - Pixish Closing October 31

  • e underestimated the “spec work” issue. People feel strongly about it, and as a professional designer for over a decade, I get it. In hindsight, we could have dealt with it better.
  • Pixish was designed as one community, but it really was a network of unaffiliated communities. The assignments that worked best happened because the publisher brought in their own people. The site was not optimized for that. We should have had more tools for assignment creators to tie their contests to their existing communities.
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25 Feb 09

11 Things Startups Should Know About Enterprise 2.0 - ReadWriteWeb

  • Parallel replacement" is new.
  • You have to show how you will do something really basic such as either a) increase revenue with a low cost of sale or, b) reduce cost on an existing process or c) create strategic sustainable advantage in measurable ways. Most likely you will do this by enabling better collaboration/communication, both within the enterprise but also, more critically, outside the firewall to the "extended enterprise".
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