In these 2 weeks, we’ve been talking and working with Elizabeth Kimball.
Elizabeth Kimball is a Freelance Consultant specialized in Innovation & Customer Experience.
In her 1st presentation, about Customer Development, she started by quoting Steve Blank on the definition of a startup:
“A Startup is a tempory organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”
She talked about why most startups fail and mentioned several reasons: team issues, premature scaling, but most importantly, lack of people that buy or use the product/service.
For a better understating of the process startups go through to find a successful business model, Elizabeth explained Blank’s ‘4 Steps to the Epiphany:’ customer discovery, customer validation, scaling, and company building.
Focused on the customer, the 9 startups at Madeira Startup Retreat evaluated what step they are in and learned best practices for customer research that can move them to the next step.
To practice what they learned, the 9 startups planned how they will test their riskiest assumptions, drafted their customer journey, and brainstormed solutions to customer acquisition challenges.
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