The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution (part 2)

In the article "The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution (part 2)" Banks continues to write about how the solution of the Product Development Model led to the Customer Development Model – A new way to approach start up Sales and Marketing activities.

He criticizes the lack of meaningful milestones for Sales, Marketing and Business Development. Especially the misleading definition of first customer ship date leads to a false structuring and an excessive hiring of Sales and Marketing people. Only after first customer ship both departments can actually find out how the customers react to the product and depending on that they need to adjust and implement their strategy in order not to burn unnecessary cash in advance. He points out this premature scaling to be “deadly” for a startup.

We learned from this article that after testing five of our hypothesis this week through different techniques, we have only just started an ongoing process of testing, testing and testing in order to do as much as possible to validate our hypothesis about customers and what they actually want – even after different milestones being set in our business plan.

Read full article here:

https://steveblank.com/2009/09/03/the-customer-development-manifesto-reasons-for-the-revolution-part-2/