Techstars MD on Customer Development: Early Stage “Sales” is Actually Product De

The job of every company in the early days is to prove their W3: Who they are selling to, what their target customer is buying and why do they buy it. In these early days the focus of the company should be customer development, and not “sales” and “product management”. How can companies focus on the W3 and eventually move into more traditional sales and product development? Techstars Managing Director and Author of Sell More Faster, Amos Schwartzfarb, shares actionable tactics to help companies prove their W3, and how early stage “sales” is actually product development. About the Speaker: While attending college at the University of Massachusetts in 1992 Amos fell in love with rock climbing which brought him to Northern California in 1993 and eventually a job packing boxes for Shoreline Mountain Project. While there Amos helped turn an old school mail-order company into one of the first e-commerce companies which launched his career into the startup world. After Shoreline, Amos went on to 6 other startups including HotJobs.com, Work.com, Business.com, mySpoonful, Blacklocus and Joust. At each of these startups, his responsibility was always directly related to figuring out product market fit, early sales and building sales organizations. Then, in 2015, he moved over to the investor side as Managing Director of Techstars in Austin. Now after over 70 seed stage investments Amos has become one of the more active early stage investors, via Techstars Austin in all of Texas.