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.

Lean 250

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Steve Blank

AUGUST 25, 2021

Inspired by her own work problem, she talked to her peers and other stakeholders, built multiple minimum viable products, and figured out how to get engineering, policy, legal, security and everyone else in the enterprise to actually approve it. An Organizational Design Problem.

Non-Compete 436

Non-Compete Government Incubator Design 436

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 6, 2020

Joe Felter , Raj Shah and I designed a class to examine the new military systems, operational concepts and doctrines that will emerge from 21st century technologies – Space, Cyber, AI & Machine Learning and Autonomy. So, it’s incumbent on us to think about the ramifications of these acquisition decisions.

Technology 405

Technology Afghanistan Iraq Vietnam 405

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

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. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk.

Vertical 147

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 15, 2010

I think everybody heard about this acquisition. They bought distribution and engineering talent. On the founder’s side it’s about taking money off of the table and / or having strategic reserves for big acquisitions. Atebits dba Tweetie (acquired by Twitter). Twitter bough their most used iPhone client.

Venture Capital 271

Venture Capital Affiliate Valuation San Francisco 271

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products. For the first 75 years of the 20 th century, when capital for new ventures was scarce, the smartest engineering talent went to corporate R&D labs.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future. Tech IPOs were a receding memory, and mergers and acquisitions became the only path to liquidity for startups. Thus began the 5-year dot-com bubble. The New Exits.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

JANUARY 8, 2019

This time-based definition made sense in the 20 th century when new disruptive ideas took years to research, engineer and deliver. To existing competitors or to existing requirements and acquisition systems they look like minimum viable products – barely finished, iterative and incremental prototypes.

China 297

China Government Russia Acquisition 297

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

Our keynote speaker was Palmer Luckey , founder of Oculus and the designer of the Oculus Rift. Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. And our course advisor – Tom Byers , Professor of Engineering and Faculty Director, STVP. Presentation Format. Team: Panacea.

Oakland 271

Oakland Lean SBIR Afghanistan 271

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2013

Todd Branchflower was one of my Lean LaunchPad students entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him to Stanford to get his graduate engineering degree. Fast-forward three years and Todd is now Captain Todd Branchflower , teaching electrical engineering at the Air Force Academy. He promised that one day he would fix that.

Silicon Valley 258

Silicon Valley Colorado Lean Connecticut 258

Duct Tape Marketing

AUGUST 29, 2014

Another useful report is Channels (Acquisition > Channels) with the “Mobile Traffic” segment applied. This tells you where your mobile users are coming from, which can influence how you design campaigns to attract more visitors. This functionality requires custom development to set up, which you can read more about here.

Analytics 65

Analytics Mobile Channel Conversion 65

Steve Blank

JANUARY 26, 2016

Hacking for Defense is a new course at Stanford’s Engineering School in the Spring of 2016. Their R&D groups and contractors had the smartest domain experts who could design and manufacture the best systems. All while we’re still writing a Request for a Proposal from within the US Government procurement and acquisition channels.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Korea Agile Lean 120

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Consequently, I either needed a tech co-founder or to pay someone to develop the product. Given those criteria, where are the watering holes to find these engineers?

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

I think this concept is necessary in order to answer the truly vexing startup questions, like: “Should startups charge customers money from day one?&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies. I had a lot of use for this concept back when I worked on game design and virtual worlds.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Insist on high levels of usability, UI design, and polish. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. We can capitalize on new customers.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2015

In a major break from the past, where the military designed all its own weapons, 10,000 scientists and engineers from academia worked in civilian-run weapons labs (most headquartered in universities) in an organization called the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). could design and produce.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Afghanistan Iraq Kuwait 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2017

That if we could get teams to rapidly discover the real problems in the field using Lean methods, and only then articulate the requirements to solve them, could defense acquisition programs operate at speed and urgency and deliver timely and needed solutions. Each of their slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley Southern California Lean San Diego 185

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

We never seek any rights to give Amex preferential treatment at the time of a potential acquisition. There is a possibility that Amex may explore acquisitions within the Amex Ventures portfolio, but those discussions will be on market terms similar to those with other potential acquirers.”. Can the founders communicate well?

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Its the same with acquisitions. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No one wants to buy you till someone else wants to buy you, and then everyone wants to buy you. The key to closing deals is never to stop pursuing alternatives. Want to learn more about me?

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.) ——————– Engineering 245.

Wiki 312

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2013

Todd Branchflower was one of my Lean LaunchPad students entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him to Stanford to get his graduate engineering degree. Fast-forward three years and Todd is now Captain Todd Branchflower , teaching electrical engineering at the Air Force Academy. He promised that one day he would fix that.

Silicon Valley 152

Silicon Valley Colorado Lean Connecticut 152

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship , an introduction to building a scalable startup. None of the students were domain experts in their areas, and each team had to figure out how to contact potential customers and channel partners.

Intellectual Property 234

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 234

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. Labels: agile , customer development 15comments: Scott Shapiro said.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2018

Each of their slide presentations follow their customer discovery journey. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. The teams presented in front of several hundred people in person and online.

Southern California 168

Southern California San Diego Mississippi SBIR 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

In a subscription business, maybe your attrition starts matching your acquisition, balancing like magic. In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly. 1) Enterprise Sales.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. ” So I’m looking at it, and the first thing I think is the design is simple. Edwin: Would I be able to attract other people if the design would be different? Jason: Some people think the design matters a lot more than that.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

Fourth , would the same Lean Startup methodology (business model design, customer development and agile engineering) used in the Lean LaunchPad and NSF I-Corps class work here? Multiple teams have been engaged by government, prime contractor and VC firms for follow-on discussions/engagements. Result: Hell yes.

Silicon Valley 129

Silicon Valley Southern California San Diego Lean 129

Steve Blank

AUGUST 1, 2016

Fourth , would the same Lean Startup methodology (business model design, customer development and agile engineering) used in the Lean LaunchPad and NSF I-Corps class work here? Multiple teams have been engaged by government, prime contractor and VC firms for follow-on discussions/engagements. Result: Hell yes.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Southern California San Diego Lean 120

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In existing companies, the goal of traditional product management and marketing is to develop a market-requirements document (MRD) for engineering that contains the sum of all possible customer feature requests, prioritized in a collaborative effort among Product Management, Marketing, Sales and Engineering.

Customer 119

Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder 119

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Customer service. Design/Front End: Twitter Bootstrap : Include this in your website, and you are half finished. LiveRoad : A Great IDE for design is very helpful. Firebase : Are all your developers front-end engineers? Google Custom Search Engine.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. is it really that the only people who can build great startups are engineers? Engineers don’t always have the best business ideas.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

Why, we just unified acquisition and engagement! I do think the concept allows us to unify acquisition and engagement, and is important for that reason. helping you balance engagement vs acquisition. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

He , Srikanth Narayan , Ben Werdmuller von Elgg , Jo Vi Ko , Justin Lee , Giovanni Tardini , David de Weerdt , Vineet Thanedar , Ryan Brideau , Jonathan Meiri , Rob Weedn , Krzysztof Kowalczyk , Greg Pilling , Kevin Leland , Parham Michael Ossareh , Dan Loewenherz , Mary Specht , Engin Erdo?an "I am a creative guy with a startup idea."

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42