I am sensing marked uptake on the concept of conducting serious customer research in order to jump start high tech start-ups. It’s about time. There’s definitely buzz building around Steve Blank’s customer development methodology. Ego dictates that whatever you’re thinking about must be what the world is thinking about and to that, I plead guilty.
But I wrote a post about an iterative, process-oriented approach to high-tech sales and marketing on 2.9.9. Shortly thereafter, Andrew Beinbrink, CEO of the interesting San Diego start-up SportsTV, introduced me to Seal Ellis who introduced me to Steven Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which sounded an awful lot like what I had blogged about. Whew. Oh, and Steve’s even got a new blog.
Continue reading 'Customer Development and Start-up Models'»
A little background is in order.
“Lean Start-up” is a phrase, I believe, coined by Eric Ries of Lessons Learned. This is a great blog and well worth you spending time with it. In a nutshell, a Lean Start-up is one that combines fast-release, iterative development methodologies (e.g., Agile) with Steve Blank’s “Customer Development” concepts. The objective is to efficiently create customer-driven products quickly and with a low burn rate.
Though I believe these principles are likely to fare well for software and even hardware products, it appears that most of those implementing the Lean Start-up are Internet-based products. Without getting too deep into the specific practices, Internet products offer several advantages:
Continue reading 'Lean Start-up Part III'»
I have a great opportunity to test out some theories about customer development, process-oriented, and metrics-driven marketing. I thought I’d keep a running blog on our progress.
Week 1 is here.
By now we have completed the following:
- documented business hypotheses;
- identified 100+ potential users — primarily through personal networks;
- identified partners;
- created interview process, objectives, and questions;
MRD is now in the hands of Engineering who is preparing wireframes. Part of our completed assumptions include the features we believe are required to secure memberships, subscriptions, and advertisers.
We have chosen our temporary blogging platform. I now need to get the “visionary” comfortable blogging.
We have discussed metrics. We have a couple of phases defined, similar to phases of customer and product development. Our primary objective at this point is to get more funding. To do so, we must go as far as we can to prove the business model. It is interesting, that even at this juncture in company development, there is difference in opinion about how to define progress. Some would like to measure progress by deliverables, which is a classic project management approach. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But how do deliverables tie to our objectives? If our objective is to earn additional funding, the “deliverable” is not “a functional web site,” but rather proof of the business model. So while proof requires a functional web site, what we actually need to achieve with existing funds is much greater.
So, what we are doing now:
- scheduling interviews with users and partners;
- developing online survey to gather more detail;
- finalizing 1st phase of product development;
- defining 1st phase metrics
Comments welcome.
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