Find a Pattern Before Scaling Up Your Sales Team - ReadWriteStar. The problem with hiring an arsenal of top sales and marketing executives when you don't have a proven customer model is that you're likely to burn through all that funding you worked so hard to get. Steve Blank's latest post entitled, It Must Be a Marketing Problem is a cautionary tale about a company that continued to scale up without knowing the needs of their customers. Customer Development at Startup2Startup View more presentations from steve blank. Blank describes being called into a company for "a marketing problem" only to find that neither the company's marketing department nor sales team had left the building to find out the needs of consumers.
He writes, "Missing the sales numbers had nothing to do with marketing...Neither the CEO, VP of Sales or VP of Marketing had any idea what a repeatable sales model would look like before they scaled the sales force. " For a more complete look at Blank's model for customer development check out this article. The Value of Design to Startups. Design and marketing are way more important than engineering for consumer Internet companies, argues angel investor Dave McClure Over the past five years I've consulted with and/or invested in about 50 startups.
I've gotten to know a lot of entrepreneurs and a fair number of the venture capital and angel investors who are backing these companies, most of which are in the consumer Internet field. And guess what? Probably more than half of the startups, and more than 90% of the investors, have no clue what they are doing when it comes to user experience and online marketing.
So what, right? Design and marketing aren't just as important as engineering: They are way more important. It's actually pretty easy to write a Web-friendly app or Web site these days. 2. Building a Company with Customer Data – Why Metrics Are Not Enou. Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. But what information to collect? Only 57 QuestionsYesterday I got an email from an ex-student lamenting that only 2% of their selected early testers responded to their on-line survey. The survey said in part: The survey has 57 questions, the last three of which are open ended, and should take about 20 minutes to complete. Please note that you must complete the entire survey once you begin. If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny. Continual Data FlowCustomer Development suggests that founders have continual and timely customer, channel and market information.
Founders need three views of information to truly understand what is going on: First-hand knowledgeA “birds-eye” viewThe view from the eyes of customers and competitors First-hand knowledgeFirst-hand knowledge is “getting outside the building” and talking to potential or actual customers. Lessons Learned.
iPad Application Design » Matt Legend Gemmell. I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here. Please note: this is about the user interface conventions and considerations which apply to creating software for the iPad platform (and touch-screen tablet devices in general). It is not a technical discussion of iPad-related APIs (which remain under NDA at time of writing in early March 2010). As I watched the iPad introduction keynote, there was one thing above all which struck me: That’s iWork (Keynote, Pages and Numbers) for iPad.
It’s not just a big iPhone The iPad may be a larger version of the iPhone in terms of the hardware and operating system, but treating it as the same device would be foolish. The Missing Link Master-Detail Two Hands.