**Lean Customer Development has been instrumental in the success of many startups. But can Lean help Fortune 500 companies too?**

Lean Customer Development is now widely seen as the best way to validate startup ideas and concepts before spending too much time on development, thanks to the efforts of its advocates, 

All the most notable startups in recent history have used some variant of Lean Customer Development.

For example:

Youtube used Lean to get a jump on its competition. 

Dropbox used Lean to validate user appetite for cloud storage. 

Twitter used Lean to identify the optimal length of tweets. 

Further reading: https://bit.ly/2WY4MFK

But what about established companies? Can Lean Customer Development help Big businesses/Enterprises too?

Absolutely. 

Lean is not just for startups.

For example, Uber, one of the fastest-growing companies in history, used Lean Customer Development to train their drivers. 

Uber had $8 billion in funding, which enabled them to skip initial research and go straight into product development. 

However, the company still benefited immensely by following Lean startup principles, including testing demand for its product with target customers. 

In the case of Uber, they used customer development to validate their business model from a supply-side rather than a demand side.

Any company targeting a new market or introducing a new product can benefit from Lean customer development. 

Lean customer development aims to gain validated, actionable insights to reduce the overall risk of any business idea. 

And this goal holds whether you're a startup or not.

If Lean customer development can help Uber train their drivers, then obviously, it's got a general application for big businesses. 

But that doesn't mean your enterprise needs to be an early adopter to benefit from it. 

There are numerous case studies of lean startup principles applied at Fortune 500 companies, including GE, Vistaprint, and Intuit.

Further reading: https://bit.ly/30fo9LS

This is good news for stakeholders and executives, who are always looking to innovate but struggling with limited resources and time. 

With Lean customer development, it's possible to validate any business idea without making sweeping changes or significant investments. 

Of course, the way you go about validating your ideas may need to be slightly different than lean startup principles suggest. 

After all, Lean customer development is not a silver bullet. 

Companies still need to put in the necessary upfront work and follow proven principles.

In future posts, we will cover how Lean customer development can help any company, regardless of its size or industry.

Further reading: https://bit.ly/3Fw1ACF

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