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10 C-Level Positions That Are Red Flags For Funding

Startup Professionals Musings

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. c-level entrepreneur funding startup titles' Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). Chief Diversity Officer. Marty Zwilling.

CTO Hire 100
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Steve Blank Discusses The Origin And Future Of The Lean Startup Movement

InfoChachkie

The Lean Startup approach dictates that successful customer development is an iterative process. By conceptualizing, selling, gathering feedback and then developing a product, startups achieve success more quickly and economically. Eric (Ries) was a student in one of the very earliest customer development classes at Berkley.

Startup 229
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Why “The Culture of Failure” is Imperative to Startup Communities

Both Sides of the Table

At this time I can tell you that the Brits definitely didn’t have a culture of failure. If your startup went belly-up (the Brits have a much more crude slang term for it) there wasn’t likely somebody lined up to fund your next attempt at a startup. 4:30 How did you come up with the idea of customer development?

Startup 350
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LeanLA Presents: Beware of False Prophets

Tech Zulu Event

Vision-Driven (You’re definitely going to need a strong vision when those sleepless nights, crying kids, and angry spouse enter the picture). Vision-Driven (You’re definitely going to need a strong vision when those sleepless nights, crying kids, and angry spouse enter the picture). Lean Approach. Model-Focused.

Startup 86
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Are Business Plans Still Necessary?

Both Sides of the Table

So, definition: when I talk about a business plan I’m not talking about a 40-page Word document outlining your market approach. That died with waterfall software development. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small?

Web 2.0 334
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5 Tips to Becoming a More Customer Centric Organization

Both Sides of the Table

I know that this all seems obvious now with the movements started by Steven Blank ( Four Steps of Epiphany ) with the whole Customer Development processes / Lean Startup movements also popularized by people like Eric Ries. Being transparent about our workload, our struggles, our fund raising, whatever. He’s a smart guy.