Henrik Berglund, Venture Cup, feb 2013

The document contrasts the search and execution phases of a startup. In the search phase, startups focus on developing a business model and hypotheses through customer development and agile processes. They use a founder-driven organization and experiential education strategies. In the execution phase, startups shift to operating plans, product management, and functional organizations as they scale, using more traditional education strategies like lectures.

This document discusses customer development and company building. It covers moving from early adopters to mainstream customers by managing sales growth based on market type. It also discusses crossing the chasm between early adopters and mainstream pragmatists. Strategies for crossing the chasm include creating a "whole product", focusing on one or two market segments, and becoming a market leader in a niche. The document also discusses evolving management and developing a mission-centric culture as a company grows.

This document discusses the differences between how startups and large companies operate. It states that startups are temporary organizations that search for a repeatable and scalable business model through customer validation and pivoting if needed, while large companies execute known business models through processes like sales, marketing and engineering plans. The document advocates that startups require different tools than large companies since they are searching for an unknown business model rather than executing a known plan.

This document discusses three types of markets that startups can enter: existing markets, resegmented markets, and new markets. It defines each market type and discusses the risks associated with each. Existing markets involve competing with incumbents for performance-seeking customers. Resegmented markets involve targeting underserved customer niches or a lower price point. New markets serve customer needs that have never been addressed before. The risks vary depending on the market type and how incumbent companies may respond. Overall, understanding the market type is important for developing the right business model and execution strategy.

This document discusses customer development as an important parallel process to product development for startups. It argues that startups often fail because they focus on product development without adequately engaging customers. The document introduces customer development as a process involving customer discovery, customer validation, and customer creation that should be synchronized with and guide product development. It emphasizes the importance of learning from customers over linear execution and achieving customer-centric milestones rather than focusing on the first customer ship date.

The document provides an overview of how to structure and teach a Lean LaunchPad flipped classroom. It discusses determining what type of students the class is for, how to structure the class into teams, emphasizing an experiential and immersive approach. Key concepts covered are searching for problems versus executing solutions, using the Business Model Canvas as a scorecard, and making customer discovery the heart of the class. It also provides resources for teaching including recommended co-instructors, a faculty handbook, and the instructor's website.

This document discusses customer development and outlines its key steps and methodology. It begins with an agenda that includes discussing the WebVan case study, testing problems and product concepts with customers, and establishing a customer development team. The rest of the document provides details on the customer development process, which involves testing hypotheses with customers through iterative phases of discovery and validation over several months or years. It emphasizes the importance of listening to customers, testing problems and products, and modifying the process for each individual company's needs.

The document provides an overview of customer development and discovery phases for a high tech startup. It discusses testing hypotheses about customers, problems, products, distribution, pricing, demand creation and competition. The key phases covered are authoring hypotheses, testing the problem hypothesis by talking to customers, presenting the problem, and testing the product hypothesis by getting early feedback and iterating before moving to customer validation.

Customer Assistant: Product Assistant: Marketing Assistant: Sales Discovery Development & PR & Distribution ! Titles describe learning tasks not execution functions ! CEO + 4 Assistants focused on learning not execution ! Small, focused on getting out of the building Customer Development in the High-Tech Enterprise Fall 2009  Customer Development Team ! CEO - Oversees entire Customer Development process ! Assistant: Customer Discovery ' Tests customer/problem hypotheses ! Assistant: Product Development ' Tests product hypotheses ! Assistant: Marketing & PR ' Tests demand creation hypotheses ! Assistant: Sales & Distribution '

This document discusses how to build a startup by focusing on customer development rather than plans or forecasts. It recommends: 1) Viewing the business model as hypotheses to be tested rather than plans to be executed. 2) Using customer development, not product development, as the strategy by testing problems and solutions with customers. 3) Pivoting the business model based on customer feedback through iterative customer discovery and validation processes.

This document provides an agenda and materials for a customer development class focusing on customer validation. The agenda includes reviewing two case studies of HP Kittyhawk and Wildfire, as well as a discussion of customer validation. The materials include slides on the HP Kittyhawk case, an overview of the customer validation phase, and details on getting ready to sell including articulating a value proposition, developing sales collateral, mapping channels and sales, hiring a sales closer, and formalizing advisory boards.

The document discusses six ways startups can fail and provides tips for success. It begins by outlining traditional models that implicitly assume the customer problem and product features are already known. However, the document argues startups should not assume they know these things and should instead search for an unknown business model. It recommends using customer development to test hypotheses about the problem, customer, and solution through interviews and iteration. The document advocates developing minimum viable products and being willing to pivot based on what is learned from customers.

The document discusses different types of startups and lessons learned about building startup ecosystems. It outlines four main types of startups - lifestyle startups that allow owners to pursue a passion, social entrepreneurship startups that solve social problems, small businesses that support families, and scalable startups designed for growth. It also examines the factors that contributed to the success of Silicon Valley's ecosystem, including government investment, university research, a culture that embraces risk, and the necessary infrastructure, culture, tools, and motivations.

The document provides advice for creating a successful startup. It discusses that Mike, an experienced executive, had a great idea for a product but some key mistakes. It outlines 5 lessons: 1) No business plan survives customer contact. 2) Have a clear business model. 3) Consider alternative models. 4) Treat your model as hypotheses to test. 5) Verify your model before building your company to avoid wasting money. It emphasizes the importance of testing assumptions through customer development and pivoting the model until it is proven.

- Startups are focused on searching for a scalable and repeatable business model through continuous customer validation and pivoting if needed. In contrast, large companies execute established business models through planning and accounting. - Traditional processes like marketing, sales, engineering are inappropriate for startups still searching for a model. Startups require agile development and customer development focused on hypothesis testing. - Once a startup finds product/market fit and a repeatable sales process, it transitions to a large company focused on growth, processes, and management over leadership. Accounting takes priority over metrics like in large companies versus the search focus of startups.

This document discusses customer creation strategies for startups. It outlines four key activities for customer creation: setting year one objectives, positioning, launch, and demand creation. It notes that customer creation strategies should differ depending on whether the startup is targeting an existing market, resegmenting an existing market, or entering a new market. The document also discusses using influence maps, sales roadmaps, and marketing metrics like the AARRR framework to track customer acquisition and retention.

This document discusses building the right product by focusing on problem/solution fit, business model/market fit, hypothesis/experiment fit, and user needs/service fit. It emphasizes the importance of validating your concepts by talking to customers and measuring results rather than assuming you know requirements. The key steps outlined are drawing a business model canvas, stating hypotheses to test, and getting customer feedback through discovery and validation. Pivoting based on learnings is important rather than prematurely scaling execution without verifying the business model. Overall the message is to interface business, design and engineering to create successful businesses by making the business the driver.

The document discusses the relationship between invention, innovation, and customers. It argues that while invention creates something new, innovation requires widespread adoption, which necessitates understanding customers. However, simply listening to customers may not lead to radical innovations if customers cannot envision solutions to problems they face. The document suggests that the wise approach is not to just listen to customers, but to understand the problems they experience and their goals, which can provide insight even if customers cannot envision specific solutions. It advocates approaches like design thinking and customer development to properly leverage customer input for innovation.

Review of Israel Kirzner's work on entrepreneurship, and of related work by entrepreneurship researchers. Paper now forthcoming in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice http://henrikberglund.com/A%20Tale%20of%20Two%20Kirzners.pdf

This document discusses the differences between startups and companies, clones and innovators, and metrics. It defines startups as temporary organizations that search for a repeatable and scalable business model under uncertainty, whereas companies execute established business models. It recommends that startups clone existing ideas 80-99% and only innovate 1-20% by picking a clear competitive dimension for users to experience. The document also stresses the importance of using appropriate metrics and only innovating on essential aspects as a startup.

This document introduces the concept of customer development and summarizes its key phases over the past decade. It begins with describing how traditional product development models made incorrect assumptions about knowing customer problems and product solutions. It then outlines Steve Blank's customer development model, including the phases of customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation, and company building. It emphasizes the importance of getting outside the building to test hypotheses through customer feedback in early phases via continuous discovery and "do-over" iterations until a repeatable and scalable business model is proven.

The 12-step document outlines a process for becoming an entrepreneur. It begins by distinguishing between different types of entrepreneurs and startups, such as lifestyle startups, small businesses, social enterprises, and scalable startups. It then discusses finding an idea of sufficient size by considering idea sources and sizing market opportunities. The document also covers crafting hypotheses about the business model, building a basic website, getting early customers, and testing the problem and solution with customer feedback through iterative development.

Finding startup ideas. Prepared for intro lecture in the class "Creating New Business" as Chalmers University of Technology.

Customer Development in start-ups, with Boo.com as an example of what may go wrong, Palm Pilot as an example of a demo prototype (early MVP), and Groupon and YouTube as examples of pivots. This presentation is based on the Customer Development theory developed by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf (http://www.steveblank.com), and is based on slides developed by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf (http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/).

Workshop at Chalmers Innovation Startup Camp 2013. This presentation is based on the Customer Development theory developed by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf (http://www.steveblank.com), and is based on slides developed by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf (http://www.slideshare.net/sblank/).

Presentation for VCs, angels and incubator coaches on how to help startups implement customer development, specifically how to identify and test startup hypotheses. Draws heavily on ideas and content from Steve Blank, Cindy Alvarez and Jason Evanish.

The document discusses phenomenology as a method for studying entrepreneurship. It begins by defining entrepreneurship as creating new products/services under conditions of uncertainty, rather than just small business ownership. It then discusses common approaches to studying entrepreneurs like traits, behaviors, cognitions and discursive factors, and argues phenomenology can provide insights these miss by focusing on entrepreneurs' lived experiences. The document provides an overview of phenomenology's principles and methods, including purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews to understand experiences, and analyzing data for themes. It provides examples of phenomenological entrepreneurship research questions and studies.

The document discusses Geoffrey Moore's book "Crossing the Chasm". The book focuses on 3 main themes: 1) the technology adoption life cycle, 2) the problem of crossing the chasm between early adopters and the early majority, and 3) solutions for how to cross the chasm. It also discusses the different customer types along the adoption curve and strategies for targeting customers, assembling resources, positioning products, and launching attacks to help cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority.

This document discusses strategies for marketing high-tech products by crossing the "chasm" between early adopters and the mainstream market. It describes Everett Rogers' diffusion of innovations theory and the technology adoption life cycle, which divides adopters into innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. For high-tech, Geoffrey Moore's model names the categories technology enthusiasts, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives and skeptics. The document explains how differences between these groups cause cracks and chasms in adoption. It advocates focusing on a beachhead segment using segmentation, differentiation, positioning and distribution to target a compelling customer and cross the chasm to the mainstream.

The document discusses Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption life cycle model and strategies for high-tech companies to cross the "chasm" between early adopters and the mainstream market. It outlines the challenges of disruptive innovation including high risk and low data. The life cycle model includes innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. To cross the chasm, companies should target an initial "beachhead" segment and provide a "whole product" solution. For B2C markets, companies should focus on acquiring, engaging, converting, and enlisting users to achieve viral growth and reach the "tornado phase". For B2B, targeting flagship customers pre-chasm and compelling use cases post

Eric Ries' presentation on lean startups. From Steve Blank's Customer Development course at Berkeley. Learn more and hear the audio at http://bit.ly/3qsvJ.

This document discusses Lean Startup principles including validated learning, building-measuring-learning quickly through iterations, and innovation accounting. It emphasizes that entrepreneurship is management, startups are experiments, and most successful startups pivot their vision based on customer feedback. The Lean Startup methodology advocates for developing minimum viable products and continuously deploying, measuring and improving through techniques like A/B testing to rapidly learn what customers want.

The document outlines an agenda for a two-day workshop on business models and customer development. Day one covers introducing customer development, developing a value proposition and identifying customer segments. Students work on an initial business model canvas and present it. Day two focuses on customer relationships, revenue streams, partners, resources/costs, and concludes with a customer development manifesto. The agenda emphasizes learning customer development strategies through hands-on exercises and student presentations of their business model canvas and customer discovery plans.

- Traditional startup models assume the customer problem and product features are known, but they are actually hypotheses that need to be tested - Startups should focus on customer development from the beginning through customer discovery, validation, and creation to learn about customers and iterate the product - The lean startup methodology emphasizes rapid iteration and minimal viable products to get customer feedback quickly rather than lengthy waterfall development processes

Steve Blank discusses how startups can fail less by focusing on customer development and business models rather than execution alone. He outlines the key insights: 1. Most startups fail due to a lack of customers, not product development issues. Customer development is a search strategy to test hypotheses about the problem and solution. 2. A business model is made up of hypotheses that need to be tested, not assumptions. Customer development helps test the hypotheses through interviews, demos, and pivots if needed. 3. Rather than managing processes, founders should run a customer development team to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Functional organizations by department are less effective than a founder-driven customer development team.

The document provides an agenda and overview for a two-day TiE workshop on best practices and principles for startups. Day 1 focuses on developing business models, including exercises on creating business model canvases (BMCs) and minimum viable products (MVPs). Day 2 involves customer investigation in the field and a retrospective. The workshop teaches entrepreneurs to validate assumptions and learn quickly by talking to customers, developing BMCs and MVPs, and iterating based on customer feedback.

The document provides an agenda and overview for a two-day TiE workshop on best practices and principles for startups. Day 1 focuses on developing business models, including using a Business Model Canvas template and developing minimum viable products. Participants then conduct customer investigations to validate their assumptions. Day 2 involves a retrospective and presentations from startup teams on their findings from customer interviews. The workshop aims to provide experiential learning for startups on iterative business model development and customer validation.

1. Marketing for high-tech startups has changed in recent years due to shifts in software markets and development philosophies. Products are often developed iteratively now rather than using the black-box model of the past. 2. When developing a marketing strategy, startups must consider the 4Ps of marketing - product, price, place, and promotion. This includes deciding where the company's product fits relative to larger competitors, choosing the appropriate pricing and distribution models, and determining how to effectively promote the product and acquire customers. 3. Effective customer acquisition involves testing various promotion channels like social media, blogs, conferences and evaluating their cost effectiveness. The goal is to drive customers through the lifecycle from initial contact

This document outlines a presentation on product management and achieving product-market fit. The presentation covers key concepts like the customer development process, lean startup theory, and crossing the chasm. It discusses tools and techniques for validating ideas with customers before and after achieving product-market fit. An exercise about strategic choices for Blackberry 10 is included to help attendees practice applying the concepts. The overall goal is to help attendees devise an approach for rapidly achieving product-market fit and avoiding wasting resources.

The document discusses how the rules for startups have changed with the rise of new tech bubbles. It outlines four phases of startup liquidity from 1970-2014 and how approaches differed between building long-term businesses versus short-term flips. The customer development process is introduced as a methodology for startups to search for their business model by testing hypotheses through customer interaction rather than relying only on plans. Metrics are emphasized over accounting, with the goal of continuous learning rather than presuming knowledge of customers or features up front.

The document provides an overview of Customer Development, which is the process startups use to search for a business model. It discusses how startups should test hypotheses about their problem, customer, product, and other business model components by getting out of the building and talking to customers. The Lean LaunchPad process of building a minimum viable product and continuously pivoting based on customer feedback is highlighted. An example is given of a team that conducted customer interviews over 8 weeks and pivoted from an autonomous mowing idea to focus on weeding for organic farmers after determining a bigger problem and opportunity.

This document discusses the concept of product-market fit and how startups can achieve it through lean startup principles. It recommends that startups rapidly test hypotheses with minimum viable products to validate their business model with customers before scaling. The document outlines tools and techniques for customer development and discovery. It contrasts the pre- and post-product market fit stages and uses the example of Foursquare to illustrate how achieving product-market fit shaped its growth challenges.

The document lists the projects and roles the author has performed at American Woodmark over their career. It includes projects in marketing, product development, national accounts, general management, and corporate training and development. Some highlights include leading the repositioning of the Timberlake brand, developing an automated pricing approval system, turning around an unprofitable division, and creating comprehensive sales and marketing training programs. The author has received six President's Awards, the company's highest honor, for projects that achieved outstanding results and improved financial performance.

This 112 slide presentation introduces key concepts about startups including: - Startups search for a business model while large companies execute established models. - Traditional business schools focus on strategies for large companies, while startups require a different approach centered on customer development, agile processes, and pivoting based on validated learning rather than upfront planning. - The business model canvas is introduced as a tool to conceptualize the key elements of a startup business model, including customer segments, value propositions, channels, and revenue streams.

Trying to connect the dots between Content Marketing and Marketing Automation? Join DemandGen for another exploration of B2B Marketing Automation best practice. This webcast will be looking at the relationship between Content Marketing and Marketing Automation. We’ve put together another panel of smart b2b practitioners. This month’s insights are provided by Doug Kessler of Velocity Partners, author of The B2B Content Marketing Workbook and Bob Apollo, founder of Inflexion-Point, B2B Sales and Marketing Performance Improvement specialists. We’ll be taking a closer look at the relationship between Marketing Automation and Content Marketing: - Rules of thought leadership - Aligning content to the buying cycle - Best practices: Building an integrated content marketing strategy with Marketing Automation tools - B2B content marketing examples and successes - Measuring the results

The document outlines six common ways startups can fail and provides advice on how to succeed instead. It discusses how startups should not try to operate like large companies by following traditional models. Startups need to search for an unknown business model rather than execute a known one. The key is getting out of the building to test hypotheses through customer development, building minimal viable products, and pivoting based on feedback.

This document discusses business models and customer development for startups versus established companies. It begins by defining companies as organizations that sell products or services for profit, organized around business models. Startups are defined as temporary organizations designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The document then discusses how companies execute business plans while startups search for their business model through customer development. It advocates that startups focus on searching for the right business model rather than executing a predetermined plan.

Steve Blank, Serial Entrepreneur & Professor, Stanford Univeristy Presentation on NextGen Entrepreneurs

The document discusses customer development and the search for a business model in startups. It emphasizes testing hypotheses with customers to validate problems and solutions. There are three types of markets - existing, resegmented, and new - that require different sales, marketing and business development approaches. The key ideas are to parallel customer development with product development using measurable checkpoints tied to customer milestones rather than just product shipments. The goal is to prove a repeatable and scalable business model before scaling the company.

This document summarizes an entrepreneur's process of validating a business idea for an autonomous weeding robot. Through interviews with 75 customers in 8 weeks, the entrepreneur learned that the biggest problem was weeding in organic crops. A minimum viable product called "CarrotBot" was built to collect machine vision data. Further customer validation revealed that both farmers and weeding service providers would be interested customers. The business model was updated to target mid-large organic farmers, agricultural corporations, and weeding service providers with a solution that reduces labor costs through automation.

The Northfront Entrepreneur Alliance is a entreprenuer networking association in Northern Utah. This presentation was given on 04.06.11 to the group by Rob Kunz- a successfull entrepreneur, investor., and co-founder of BoomStartup. He discusses the Lean Startup Business Model and how to apply it.

Steve Budra has extensive experience leading marketing strategies that have generated significant revenue growth for companies. As highlighted in testimonials, he is praised for his creativity, vision, ability to execute plans, and delivering great results. His background includes tripling revenues for a graphic arts supplier through rebranding and international expansion, and increasing product revenue 400% for a business forms manufacturer through affiliate partnership strategies.