1. You’ve got an idea. Now what?
Product Ideation & Customer Development
Hiten Shah
Startup Roots - Pier 38, San Francisco, CA • June 30, 2010
2. The Startup Pyramid
The Race to the Top
Growth
Transition to Growth
Product / Market Fit
Sean Ellis: Startup-Marketing.com
3. Product / Market Fit
• Low burn, focused on product, no VPs / sales people
• Customer Development (Steve Blank, Four Steps)
• Minimum Viable Product (Eric Ries, The Lean Startup)
• Pivots (Eric Ries, The Lean Startup)
“…the life of any startup can be divided into two parts –
before product/market fit and after product/market fit.”
Marc Andreesen, Founder of Netscape
4. Customer Development
• It’s all about learning and discovery
• Outlined by Steve Blank in Four Steps to the Epiphany
Customer STOP
Customer STOP
Customer STOP
Scale STOP
Discovery Validation Creation Company
Pivot
5. Minimum Viable Product
• Coined by Eric Ries as part of The Lean Startup
• Lean Startups are a series of MVP’s
• Each designed to answer a specific question (hypothesis)
“ The minimum viable product (MVP) is often an ad on
Google. Or a PowerPoint slide. Or a dialog box. Or a landing
page. You can often build it in a day or a week.”
Nivi, Venture Hacks
6. “ If Apple can launch a smartphone without Find or Cut-and-
Paste, what can you cut out of your product requirements?”
Lance Glasser, former CTO KLA-Tencor
7. “ The first version of Gmail was literally written in a day”
Paul Buchheit, Google / Friendfeed / Facebook
9. My hypothesis is that twitter power users have
a problem tweeting interesting things.