Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. We had multiple business plan competitions.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 11, 2020

Many passionate entrepreneurs fight to add more features into their new products and services, assuming that more function will make the solution more appealing to more customers. Focus is the art of limiting your scope to the key function that really matters for the majority of customers. It’s tough for an elephant to be agile.

Startup 424

Startup Bandwidth Distribution Agile 424

Up and Running

JANUARY 25, 2018

What exactly needs to be included in a business plan, and in how much detail? You may have been told that the more detail you can include in your business plan, the better, but this is not necessarily the best strategy for everyone. Digital businesses need to be agile and reactive too.

eCommerce 96

eCommerce Business Plan Audience Lean 96

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

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.

Technical Review 327

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 327

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

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.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Up and Running

AUGUST 8, 2018

This article, which originally appeared on our LivePlan Blog , is part of our “Business Planning Guide” —a curated list of our articles that will help you with the planning process! For us, business planning isn’t just a one-time or annual event. Most people think that meetings are a waste of time. They’re right.

Software Review 65

Software Review Business Plan Product Forecast 65

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 3, 2018

Mobile app development is not just about developing an app for either android or IOS. App development is a cumbersome process that involves a lot of micro-managed aspects to be catered to. Mobile app development is primarily divided into 9 stages right from the phase of ideation to running a successful business.

Mobile 113

Mobile Developer Social Media Later Stage 113

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

Most principles of Lean Startup remain true, as described by Steve Blank in The Lean Startup Changes Everything : Business Plans are dead: Startups a series of hypothesis that need to be tested. Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

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.

Technical Review 219

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 219

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

It’s hard to imagine, but only a decade ago, the capstone entrepreneurship class in most universities was how to write – or pitch- a business plan. In my experience, I saw that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. Product/Market Fit Versus The Business Model Canvas.

Lean 248

Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 248

Steve Blank

JANUARY 27, 2011

student of our MS&E department at Stanford ,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship. The most visible step was the first International Business Model Competition , hosted by the BYU Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology. Business Model Versus Business Plan.

Business Model 275

Business Model Utah Intellectual Property Agile 275

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Build a product, get it into the real world, measure customers’ reactions and behaviors, learn from this, and use what you’ve learned to build something better. Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development. Microsoft Windows 3.0).

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model. Nail it to your wall.

Customer Development 328

Customer Development Developer Customer Cofounder 328

Up and Running

AUGUST 23, 2016

“I had a lot of requests for freelance work,” Kinsman says, “so I decided to set up a branding and marketing business in Hong Kong.”. Thirteen years later, Kinsman is a veteran of the industry and a thought leader advocating in Forbes for an agile approach. The agile strategy is all about brand flexibility. Brand activation.

Agile 60

Agile Viral Social Media Differentiation 60

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual. And you’ll learn about how to build a minimal viable product to get feedback early and often from customers.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. The Lean LaunchPad class uses the three “ Lean Startup ” principles: Alexander Osterwalders “ business model canvas ” to frame hypotheses.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.).

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

Defense and Intelligence organizations drove the pace of innovation in Silicon Valley by providing research and development dollars to universities, and defense companies built weapons systems that used the Valley’s first microwave devices and semiconductor components. and there were no books, blogs or YouTube videos about entrepreneurship.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. Teaching In the Big Apple.

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Business Model Developer Design 270

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

With an out-of-this-world business plan. When it was spun out as a a separate company, Iridium’s 1990 business plan had assumptions about potential customers, their problems and the product needed to solve that problem. A Business Plan Frozen in Time. It is death in a rapidly changing business.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. We were positing that 20 years of teaching “how to write a business plan” might be obsolete. This post is part one.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad. The objective of this course is that groups of students finish with a completed software product that has real customers and an identified market. The syllabus for the Stanford course can be seen here.

Chile 235

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 235

YoungUpstarts

MAY 9, 2017

Lean is a methodology that can be applied to all disciplines of knowledge work to increase business efficiency, agility, and visibility. Lean is more about aligning your organization’s skills, talents, resources, processes, and strategy with the needs of your customers. 2 More Efficient Business Processes.

Lean 124

Lean Agile Technical Review Dilution 124

The Equity Kicker

MAY 7, 2013

It’s companies are different to traditional economy companies because they are focused on delighting customers and rapid innovation. Creative economy companies have, in effect, adopted agile methodologies across all their business areas and it isn’t surprising that most traditional companies find it impossible to copy them.

Development Team Review 94

Development Team Review Business Plan Agile Operations 94

Up and Running

AUGUST 17, 2020

Typically this means investing in sales technology that makes you more agile and is easily scalable as you drive long-term growth. When your business is first starting out and serving a smaller customer base , it can be fairly easy to draft personalized sales quotes in a timely manner. It’s how you develop client relationships.

Software Review 113

Software Review Software Sales Small Business 113

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 17, 2014

Many passionate entrepreneurs fight to add more features into their new products and services, assuming that more function will make the solution more appealing to more customers. Focus is the art of limiting your scope to the key function that really matters for the majority of customers. It’s tough for an elephant to be agile.

Bandwidth 262

Bandwidth Distribution Agile Social Media 262

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

With hindsight we should have had “proof of concepts” tested in a corporate center (think ‘pop-up incubator’) where they would do extensive Customer Discovery. We should had done this before assigning the teams to a particular business unit (or had the ability to create a new business unit, or spin the team out of the company).

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 14, 2024

The Strategist In the startup world, a strategist is the master of maneuvering through the complexities of business planning and market analysis. Their expert understanding of digital marketing strategies, social media tactics and trend spotting allows them to build brand recognition while increasing customer retention rates.

Startup 114

Startup Retention Agile Hiring 114

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. It made more sense than our 60 page business plan predicated on a B-school class and a supernatural ability to predict the future. It’s your vision damn it!

Customer Development 230

Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

Second, this class – which is built on the idea of interviewing customers/beneficiaries and stakeholders in person – now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How on earth would customer interviews work via video? Hacking for Conservation and Development at Duke followed.

Oakland 301

Oakland Asia Lean Video 301

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 16, 2018

A home-based business should still function in some ways like a bigger firm. They of course need to be agile and adaptable, but home businesses should still have some formalized planning and structure. One area of planning that’s sorely lacking for these types of companies is a plan on protecting data.

Software Review 100

Software Review Technical Review Security Cloud 100

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go” instead of detailed, formal business plans. Lean Planning started with Tim Berry ‘s 2008 “ Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan ” which was a new way for entrepreneurs to think about planning. The business plan should no longer be just a single event.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 14, 2012

The class was designed to teach educators (and the entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. But on the first day, Steve framed it in a different way: execution of a business plan doesn’t matter.

Developer 300

Developer Arizona Lean Business Model 300

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 5, 2021

To turn your passion into profits, emphasize the market, and always think about your business relative to the customers you serve. Know your markets and execute on your market opportunity by placing a priority on your customer’s experience and perception of value. To succeed, a new venture needs both iteration and agility.

Agile 363

Agile .Net Founder Entrepreneur 363

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2020

We’re holding a series of 5-day online classes at Stanford where teams will learn how to develop new business models for an economy that’s getting back to work and on the road to recovery. The Covid-19 virus has upended traditional ways of doing business, travel, education, entertainment, healthcare, etc. Sign up at [link].

Lean 436

Lean Business Model Affiliate Incubator 436