
How to develop your customers like you develop your product - qhoxie
http://venturehacks.com/articles/customer-development
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curiousgeorge
Perhaps someone could share the idea. Video files don't work for a lot of
(text-oriented) surfers, and it would be useful not to have to read the book
to know if it is any good..

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ojbyrne
Because its about marketing, its hard to capture the ideas without sounding
trite and simplistic. Basically keep your burn rate low while "developing"
your market. And that "developing" your market is an iterative process of
basically trying things, getting customer feedback, trying more things
informed by that feedback, repeat until you find a viable market. In other
words, just as you would iterate your product development (always with the
possibility of going back to the start) you should do the same with your
market development. Don't be afraid to fail.

Some of the nicer points from the video (in my opinion):

* 90% of startups fail not because of technological barriers but because they fail to find and develop their market.

* Too many startups try to imitate the corporate structure of larger companies - acting like the company they want to grow up to be - rather than having a corporate structure that suits their stage of growth.

* He recommends having a "market development" group rather than the typical VP/Sales, VP/Marketing structure.

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dmix
His talk at Stanford was excellent. Business school always teaches you to be
customer-focused but its so easy to lose sight of what that actually means.

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ojbyrne
I guessed from the title that it was going to be associated with that book.
Its a really good read, and the best thing that's come from Marc Andreesen's
blog. Highly recommended.

