Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. Frank Robinson of SyncDev has been helping companies figure out their minimum viable product and pivots since 1984, long before I even knew what it meant. They’ve done it for more than 400 companies ranging in size from 200 hundred starts-ups, one of whom was Citrus Systems that became Citrix, to IBM.

San Jose 256

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 256

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

A founder’s skill is knowing how to recognize new patterns and to pivot on a dime. At times the pattern is noise, and the vision turns out to be a hallucination. Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup. ——— Yuri, one of my ex students started a big-data analytics company last year. He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30.

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2012

By 1997 E.piphany was a fast growing startup with customers, revenue and something approaching a repeatable business model. Somewhere that year we decided to professionalize our logo (you should have seen the first one.) With a massive leap of creativity we decided that it should it should have our company name and the letter “E” with a swoop over it. 1997 was also that year that Microsoft was in the middle of the browser wars with Netscape.

SQL 282

SQL Naming Internet Software 282

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2012

Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad.

Lean 253

Lean Customer Development Developer Customer 253

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2012

At times not losing is as important as winning. Customer Validation. E.piphany was an 11-month-old startup with 31 people and on fire. We had closed four $100,000 deals for our customer relationship management software. Joe Dinucci, our VP of Sales, was hot on the trail of our next big order. He had just demo’d our product to his friend, the CFO of Autodesk.

Forecast 290

Forecast Sales Matching Customer Development 290