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Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model

Steve Blank

Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. He took a deep breath, looked around the boardroom table and then proceeded to outline a radical reconfiguration of the product line (repackaging the products rather than reengineering them) and a change in sales strategy, focusing on a different customer segment.

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The 47th (-46) International Business Model Competition

Steve Blank

The most visible step was the first International Business Model Competition , hosted by the BYU Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. We’ve been teaching that the difference between a startup and an existing company is that existing companies execute business models, while startups search for a business model.

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Customer Development for Web Startups

Steve Blank

Customer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. How you execute Customer Development varies, depending on your type of business. In my book, “ The Four Steps to the Epiphany ” I use enterprise software as the business model example.

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When Hell Froze Over – in the Harvard Business Review

Steve Blank

In my 21 years as an entrepreneur, I would come up for air once a month to religiously read the Harvard Business Review. It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me a view of the management issues my customers were dealing with. I learned about Michael Porter s’s five forces.

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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Given the stock market was buying “the story and vision” of anything internet, inflated expectations were more important than traditional metrics like customers, growth, revenue, or heaven forbid, profits. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

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How To Find the Right Co-Founders?

Steve Blank

Surprisingly if you’ve filled out the business model canvas you already know who you need. I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. ——-. I told Radhika this is a perennial question for startups.

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Rising out of the Crisis: Where to Find New Markets and Customers

Steve Blank

The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Suppliers are going out of business or requiring cash-up-front terms. Here’s how.

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