Next week Ethan and I will be speaking at Berkeley to the MBA class that Steve Blank and Eric Ries created around Customer Development (CD) and Lean Startup.

Am I nervous? Heck yeah! Steve’s the God Father of CD and known for being brutally honest. All we can do is tell our story with as much passion and honesty as possible.

If you’re new to Customer Development or Lean Startup, be sure to read Steve Blanks blog, or his book: Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Last month in Boston I got to speak with a groups of statrups about Customer Development and the best feedback I got was “get straight to the stories, don’t focus on the mechanics … tell us what YOU did it - not how to do it.”. So with that feedback fresh in my mind, our talk next week will be 100% story based.

The 7 personal stories on Customer Development / Lean Startup I’ll be talking about:

1. Customer Developement (CD) is freakin’ hard.
2. Focus on the problem, not the solution.
3. Don’t solve problems you’re not passionate about.
4. Being good at sales is a bad thing.
5. You need thick skin to do it right.
6. Stop geeking out on the numbers.
7. Pivoting to perfection (again, problem not solution)

Interested in stopping by? Learn how here.

Are you implementing Customer Development / Lean Startup processes in your startup? If so, what have you learned?

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