Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

No one was actually quite that good, but some VCs had “golden guts” for these kinds of operating issues. I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. “Oh Oh yes, company X, they’re having problem 343.

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. Greetings from Crete, Greece Reply Jerry Ji , on April 10, 2009 at 11:09 am Said: Simply _THE BEST_ war story I’ve read in months.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. It was fun watching it happen.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

It wasn’t until I found the extremely obscure Lanchester Strategy for market share that I realized that these ratios had their basis in operations research and the Lanchester’s Laws.) Our company’s graphics boards were designed to speed up a key part of the Macintosh graphics operating system called QuickDraw.

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Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The “Good” Student » 14 Responses Shane Rogers , on April 6, 2009 at 1:37 pm Said: The names of ‘secret’ customers is funny. If you think the Cold War turned out the right side up (i.e.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Would love to read that whole thing at one go… Reply Alvin , on March 21, 2009 at 7:02 pm Said: Great stuff! Reply steveblank , on March 23, 2009 at 12:11 am Said: Alvin, you can buy the book online at [link] They ship to the Philippines. I read all your posts today and can’t wait for the next one.

Silicon Valley 134

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. Well, you couldn’t stand in front of the German radars and throw out tin foil, but you could if you had a fleet of airplanes.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. May 6, 2009 3:03 PM Ivan Acosta-Rubio said.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 15, 2009 Why Continuous Deployment? One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Customer development. For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought Id include a few links. For customer development, start with Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany or take a look at his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture. Keep posting and thank you!

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Embrace technical debt Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. Lean vs. debt In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it. July 29, 2009 6:57 AM Heiner Wolf said.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale. Labels: agile , customer development 15comments: Scott Shapiro said.

Customer 167

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, February 22, 2009 Please teach kids programming, Mr. President Of course, what I really mean is: let them teach themselves. February 22, 2009 5:54 PM CapnCleaver said. February 22, 2009 10:14 PM Aleks said. February 23, 2009 2:22 AM Clement said. February 23, 2009 9:23 AM Clement said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. January 21, 2009 6:39 AM Kevin Merritt said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Indeed the first thing I thought when I read the first paragraphs that the product manager was operating in a white tower and that the developers felt disenfranchised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? This post has been removed by the author. Nice write-up.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. What is customer development? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuous deployment. Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. Labels: product development 5comments: new york web development company said. it is very helpful for me.

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009 - Business of Software Blog , May 4, 2010 "In the old days, getting customers was easy. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. You could just outspend. You could use brute force to get the word out. Now, thanks to social media, you don't have to outspend.

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Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

In management jobs related to operations – that is, the people tasked with actually making and distributing physical products – this kind of thinking is now considered ludicrous, thanks to a century of progress. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 8, 2009 Datablindness Most of us are swimming in a sea of data about our products, companies, and teams. That’s why we have operations alerts trigger a page, but it can also work for other customer events. June 8, 2009 8:28 PM Geoff said. June 9, 2009 12:01 AM Lorenz said.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. What is customer development? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries. (In

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Because there are no tests for new features (or operational alerts for the production code), the code that supports those new features could go bad at any moment. Crosby made this argument in his book "Quality Is Free: The Art of Making Quality Certain" (Mentor, 1980) April 2, 2009 6:24 AM The Caretaker said. Not bad for an engineer.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me –“That’s a great hypothesis, do customers tell you that they’d buy your version if it was cheaper or on the web?

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Posted on March 29, 2009 by steveblank This is post II of how I came to write “ The Secret History of Silicon Valley “ 1974. All as an integral part of the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan – our war-fighting plan to destroy the Soviet Union. In the Air Force?

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Martin , on November 9, 2009 at 6:41 am Said: Hmm… Not to get too meta here… But if the point of this post is to teach us how to distinguish motion from action (even partly), I didn’t get much help. Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal.

Silicon Valley 324

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. Reply Ray Debs , on April 29, 2009 at 6:55 pm Said: Hi Steve, I am thoroughly enjoying reading your blog posts, and looking forward to more. It may not be for you.

Silicon Valley 170

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. What is customer development? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? Website Analysis.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Posted on April 2, 2009 by steveblank A comment left on the previous post made me realize that it was time to discuss a subject I was going to save for latter – ethics. The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.”

Founder 297

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 297

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. Martin , on April 23, 2009 at 11:28 am Said: Have you read Carol Dweck’s Mindset. Reply Chris Hopf , on April 23, 2009 at 11:47 am Said: Thanks for sharing Steve. Ownership and Teamwork not turf. Reply Michael F.

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