Lean Startups and Customer Development Resources

Guest post by Sarah Milstein, CEO of Lean Startup Productions The 2013 Lean Startup Conference was a hit on several levels, with many people ...

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. With five days remaining before The Lean Startup Conference, we wanted to lay ...

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Our fall webcast series concluded on a high note with three extraordinary ...

This post co-written by Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. Our goal in hosting The Lean Startup Conference—which starts ...

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. We were excited by the response at last year’s Lean Startup Conference to ...

While the Lean LaunchPad class has been adopted by Universities and the National Science Foundation, the question we get is, “Can students in K-12 handle ...

In the last few years we’ve recognized that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. We’re now learning that companies are ...

Since 2005 startup accelerators have provided cohorts of startups with mentoring, pitch practice and product focus. However, accelerator Demo Days are a combination of graduation ...

Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies. — Awhile back I blogged ...

Two of the hot topics in education in the last few years have been Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) and the flipped classroom. I’ve been ...

hi folks. I’m now blogging over at 500hats.com, using the svbtle.com platform. see you around, DMC

This is a very special post for me to write, to congratulate some good friends on a job well done. I first met Rashmi many ...

i look kinda scruffy in this Fast Company intvw, but it’s mostly on target.

i’m not doing much blogging at the moment, as you can probably tell from this site. apologies however i’ve been kinda busy getting 500 Startups ...

(ok folks, i’ve gotta take the kids to basketball practice in a few hours, so will try to power through this — that means limited ...

Startups live and die by their ability to drive customer acquisition growth.  Of course many startups are doomed to failure and can’t grow because they ...

Yesterday was the third time the Growth Hackers Conference was held in Silicon Valley.   It’s humbling to be a part of the speaker lineup ...

Guest Post By Conrad Egusa  I want to begin by thanking Sean for the opportunity to write this guest article. I came across Sean’s website ...

FACT: Conversion Rate Optimization tops the Digital Marketing Priorities for 2013 according to the Econsultancy Report: “Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Digital Trends for 2013″ Looks ...

Focus is the most precious asset for any startup CEO.  As much as I love blogging about startup marketing, it just isn’t a very good ...

I’m going to go out on a limb here. I guarantee that good startup mentors exist everywhere, even in your neck of the woods. Without ...

Mentoring is also a more significant part of the economy today than since, perhaps, apprentorship in the craftsman age. Why? The rise of entrepreneurship ...

With Brad Feld coming to town this week, I think it’s a good time to evaluate the state of San Diego’s Startup Community. If you ...

Whether you are a government entity attempting to grow a startup ecosystem, a university trying to commercialize technology, a big business intent on reinvigorating (or ...

Those who run in #LeanStartup circles know too well the problems encountered with language.  Eric Ries, Steve Blank and others are criticized for choosing terms ...

A basic tenet of running lean is validating a product or feature ideally without having to building it first The first battle isn’t fought on ...

It’s not enough just to talk to customers. You have to know know. In this post, Garrett shares his lessons learned for crafting effective customer ...

In my post “Why You Should Never Ask Customers What They’ll Pay, I covered how to uncover initial pricing for your product by first spending ...

Can you imagine Steve Jobs asking you what you would have been willing to pay for an iPad before it launched? Sounds ludicrous right? Yet, ...

In his book, “All Marketers are Liars Tell Stories”, Seth Godin defines a “worldview” as the set of rules, values, beliefs, and ...

In tech startups, The Engineer’s Conceit is thinking that: a) you know what needs to be built b) you create value by rolling up your ...

In tech startups, The Marketer’s Conceit is thinking that: a) you only have one chance to ‘make a good first impression’ b) your ‘brand’ matters ...

Because the current criticism of lean startup and customer development is, for the most part, so markedly atrocious, so lacking concrete insight and usually amounts ...

Penicillin was discovered on September 28, 1928 by the serendipitous efforts of Scottish scientist, Alexander Fleming. Legend has it that Fleming noticed an open petri ...

An entrepreneur named Nick Jones recently reached out to me after reading The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development. Nick is the founder of Lavish Longboards. ...

Like many folks over the last couple days, I downloaded Secret and started playing with it over the weekend. The NYT even wrote an article ...

Happy new year! Here’s a quick list of some of the essays I wrote (and guest posted) for 2013. Long form stuff Zero to Product/Market Fit ...

Building a great product is not enough Today I read a well-done article by The Verge on the shutdown of Everpix, a photo startup that’s ...

My friend Gagan Biyani wrote up a great piece how to analyze what your Facebook audience is interested in, and using that to buy ads. ...

[Andrew: Christoph Janz has written some of the best essays on SaaS metrics and cohort analyses, and he was kind enough share the latest with us ...

Q: I am building an app that helps people build nearby interest groups (e.g. local model railroaders, quilters in your town, etc…). I am trying ...

I came across this presentation from LLKD13 (#LLKD13  / storify) by Patrick Steyaert (@PatrickSteyaert) of Okaloa on Discovery Kanban after following some links off a Kanban ...

Q:  I can’t get people to use my service. For the last 9 months or so I been trying to get it going, trying to validate ...

“Luck cannot be duplicated.” Richard Kostelanetz Riffing on a Nov-2-2013 TechCrunch post by Cowboy Ventures‘ Aileen Lee (@aileenlee) “Welcome To The Unicorn Club: Learning From Billion-Dollar Startups” ...

Are you a startup founder or an innovator at a tech company with burning questions looking to get some great advice on your venture or ...

Must be a 1-(wo)man startup. Must code. Must write good copy. Must be passionate about solving problems for our customers, not “designing.” Must fix other ...

I do the onboarding for all new AngelList team members. Part of it is asking them to read the following (many candidates have read these ...

We care about: Eliminating frictions so startups can change the world Connecting startups with their ideal partners, on the best terms, fast Building tools for ...

How much traction do you need to raise $1M? AngelList’s Ash Fontana has the answer on TechCrunch: Read the post for details and also see these ...

We use very little email at AngelList. Most of our communication happens on Yammer, HipChat, Tracker and face-to-face. This probably gets us a 90% reduction ...

Even if/when you have an established business model, change being what it is, there is always something needing a change – add a new product ...

Looking at existing products to infer customer preferences is useful, but probably not as useful as talking to customers directly. You also need to factor ...

I’ve got a couple of things to clear up regarding the Lean Canvas. It seems like its great for innovating a new product, but what ...

Patrick, Enrico’s suggestion is excellent — “The Mom Test” is a must read for finding and validating product-market fit. “*We’re not in the business of ...

You’ll never fail if you don’t give up. Anyway I think that you were trying different marketing methods and messages that did not work because, ...

http://bmfiddle.com/http://businessmodelzen.com/http://CanvasBM.comhttp://canvanizer.com/ supports BMC and Lean Canvashttp://www.bmcanvas.comhttp://www.boardofinnovation.com/business-model-templates-tools/http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvashttp://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/toolboxhttp://businessmodelpress.com/

added http://businessmodelzen.com/ which takes an outside in view of business model

adding BMC tool (free Omnigraffle templating set up)

Added new meetup group in Minneapolis, MN

Some useful blog posts and articles for defining, measuring, and managing churn.   http://www.happybootstrapper.com/2013/churn-define-active-and-lost-customer/ http://chaotic-flow.com/saas-metrics-faqs-what-is-churn/ http://blog.asmartbear.com/cancellation-rate-in-saas-business-models.html http://www.happybootstrapper.com/2013/wasting-time-money-to-improve-customer-churn-rate/ http://sixteenventures.com/saas-churn-rate http://www.happybootstrapper.com/2013/calculate-saas-churn-rate-from-db/