Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” Reply Nathan Furr , on September 24, 2009 at 9:20 am Said: Great post and wise advice. While this sounds inexplicable to an outside observer, sometimes it makes sense.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

After many sales calls, early prospects showed little rush to buy it! A few of the many quotations that struck me: “Most startups fail due not to the failure of product development but due to the lack of customers”. Evangelizing Customer Development in Japan. But customers didn’t agree.

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Japan Customer Development Developer Customer 292

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. What happened?

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Blog at WordPress.com.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Market Risk vs. Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. Am I in a company with “invention risk?

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

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. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. Remember Hamlet?

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Of course, the sales folks had new features as their #1 priority.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In contrast, sales and marketing activities before first customer ship are adhoc, fuzzy, and don’t have measurable, concrete objectives. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you dont have to give up on your dream. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. If I get sales I will expand on the site. March 14, 2009 8:34 AM Can Sar said.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. So What is Customer Development? The Problem With Traditional Product Development.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 7, 2018

They live their purposes inside out, and everything else falls into place, always returning to the purpose that made them visionaries to guide the brand and its product development when things get difficult, markets change, or downfalls occur. Caring Energy: The Best Marketing and Sales Strategy.

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Operations Sales Restful Green 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

the version that would facilitate the investment of real money) was planned for late-2009. To acquire new money managers, the company makes traditional sales calls, which means they’ve interviewed many, many professionals and gotten a strong sense of their needs. The result? says Rachleff. The result? says Rachleff.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. This post describes such a model.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

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. For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. June 8, 2009 8:28 PM Geoff said.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

This gets me into trouble, because it conjures up for some the idea that product development is simply a rote mechanical exercise of linear optimization. You just constantly test little micro-changes and follow a hill-climbing algorithm to build your product. March 26, 2009 6:15 PM Will said.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

ConversionXL

MAY 1, 2017

Reporting in the Harvard Business Review on a major study of growth stalls they conducted, Olson and his colleagues cite the case of the iconic brand Levi Strauss, which hit a historic high mark of sales in 1995, reaching revenue of $7 billion, but then, starting in 1996, saw a decline in sales so precipitous that by 2000, revenue was down to $4.6

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Technical Review Algorithm Channel Analytics 127

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 24, 2009 Marching through quicksand I have been spending a lot of time lately talking to people in various media companies: editors and agents, executives, journalists, producers and directors. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another? How does product development differ in communications hardware versus enterprise software, etc.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JANUARY 6, 2011

Shawn Gupta of OhLife , a personal journaling tool over email, has similar sentiments in using metrics to drive product innovation: Make metrics a core part of our product development. It will be a lot easier for us to make improvements to our product when we have data-driven discussions and decisions.

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Stealth Startup Lean Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan realized that the traditional centralized management structures (like General Motors had in 1920) were poor fits for the management of GM’s already diverse product lines. 2) Provide corporate management with near real-time divisional sales reports and budgets that indicated when they deviated from plan.

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Duct Tape Marketing

NOVEMBER 9, 2022

Clare Price (03:49): Well, the way that we do it is we've developed six canvases that focus on six core areas of business growth. And that's brand development, brand power, customer acquisition, message clarity, market expansion, sales enablement, so marketing and sales working together and product marketing or product innovation.

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Marketing Differentiation Sacramento Small Business 76

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. Is there a profitable business model? Can it scale?”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 17, 2010

We’ll be conducting a series of educational programes covering: fund raising, team building, product development, sales, marketing, business development and how to prioritize your time as a CEO. But at the highest level they’ve created a marketplace for “flash&# sales.

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Los Angeles Stealth Securities and Exchange Commission Southern California 276

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, March 4, 2009 Lo, my 2295 subscribers, who are you? But if that piece-parts solution is great, then its unlikely they are going to need to buy any additional products. March 7, 2009 3:31 PM Eric said. Thanks again, Eric March 7, 2009 3:35 PM NewWorldOrder said. Great post.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Austin Startup

AUGUST 20, 2017

Of all your hires, if you have commissioned sales people, those will give you the most problems if they’re not all given an equal chance to make their quotas and achieve their personal earnings goals. If you’ve been in the sales game, you know that most customers will sell themselves if you just let them. You’ve just got to listen.

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Technical Review Software Review Cap Table Securities and Exchange Commission 48

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 19, 2009 Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a response) Inc Magazine has a great new piece up about the increasing use of the Minimum Viable Product by businesses (and not just startups). Read the rest. Read the rest. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. Take a look and let me know what you think.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Meanwhile, individuals and smaller companies emailed by the hundreds to say that they wanted the features of custom channels, but the sales model—arranged like a media buy—didn’t make sense to them. Towards a new entrepreneurship ► 2009 (88) ► December (4) Continuous deployment for mission-critical applica.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, March 13, 2009 Dont launch Heres a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? Over at PBwiki, our general policy is to conduct a marketing launch after the product is already a success. March 13, 2009 1:50 PM dan simard said. Great article.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, February 28, 2009 Throwing away working code Lean startups work by systematically eradicating waste. This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, April 9, 2009 Built to learn Its been an exhilarating ride since the Web 2.0 Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge. Andy April 10, 2009 9:57 AM Eric Santos said. April 11, 2009 3:50 PM Tina said.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 8, 2009 What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups? September 8, 2009 6:12 PM Geoff Hsaid. September 8, 2009 6:25 PM dbsaid. September 9, 2009 12:36 AM Richard Tibbetts said. Agree with all your points. Current rules are good enough now.

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90