Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Back then, an entrepreneur used a serial product development process that proceeded step-by-step with little if any customer feedback. Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s. customer segments, such as users and payers or moms or teens.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Disruption today is more than just changes in technology, or channel, or competitors – it’s all of them, all at once. These processes reduce risk to an overall organization, but each layer of process reduces the ability to be agile and lean and – most importantly – responsive to new opportunities and threats.

Government 317

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 317

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

JULY 13, 2021

Business plans presume that building a startup is a series of predictable steps requiring execution of a plan which assumes a series of known facts: known customers, known features, known pricing, known distribution channel. The reality is that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers.

Lean 435

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 435

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

(Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.). Instead of adopting the management techniques of large companies, which too often stifle innovation in a young start up, entrepreneurs began to develop their own management tools. Happy Thanksgiving.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 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. Startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. The Adventure Begins.

Lean 300

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 300

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. In contrast, spark gaps are broad-band radio “noise&# sources – the idea of discrete radio channels was impossible spark gaps because of this.

Silicon Valley 279

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 279

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

Customer Development 226

Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 226

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.

Customer Development 246

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 246

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. Continuous innovation requires the imagination and courage to challenge the initial hypotheses of your current business model (channel, cost, customers, products, supply chain, etc.)

Restful 227

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 227

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

MARCH 11, 2016

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, – the business model – is what turns a product into a business. We designed our class to do something different. Every week the teams present their results.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Because of the vagaries of how floating point units in computers were designed, your average IBM mainframe of the day would take forever to run a simulation application. Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile. What Markets?

Silicon Valley 151

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 151

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? Here’s an attempt to put this all in context.

Search 322

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 322

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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. End result? If they had done this, there would have been zero dollars in sales.

Customer Development 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. By design not by exception. The question is – why? This is a big idea. Lessons Learned.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

These diagrams are the visual representation of the how and the what a team learned in the class – how they tested their hypotheses by getting out of the building using the Customer Development process and what they learned about each part of their business model. The Lean LaunchPad was designed to fill that void.

Lean 281

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 281

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.) There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) to optimize this search. What are hypotheses?

Wiki 312

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

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. What is customer development?

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model - first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.). Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? hope to hear from you.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

A business plan has a set of assumptions (who’s the customer, what’s the price, what’s the channel, what are the product features that matter, etc.) Yet by first customer ship most of the business model hasn’t been validated or tested. Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack.

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 248

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Waves of technology platforms The lean startup Customer Development Engineering Greasemonkey compiler Great open source scalability tools from Danga Ideas.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

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. They made other assumptions about the type of sales channel, partnerships and revenue model they would need. Lessons Learned.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

More agile competitors are starting to eat into our business. I suggested the best place to start the conversation is with the 21 st century definition of a startup: A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. How can we restart our innovation culture?”. That’s now changed.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Someone from your company has to be designated the official competitive intelligence officer for this show. Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) One of them is a loser.

Silicon Valley 129

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 129

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Recently, he was bitten by the lean startup bug and has started writing about his experiences attempting to apply lean startup and customer development principles. Managing weekly releases got a lot harder once I started doing customer development. The release process took at least half a day and sometimes the whole day.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

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. Instead, each potential customer has to go through a self-serve process of signing up and paying money. Go on an agile diet quickly.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 28, 2017

The goal of the class is to expose students to the basics of the Lean Methodology – Business Model Design , Customer Development and Agile Engineering. In an existing market, going through customer discovery (talking to customers, buyers, distribution channel, etc.) What was critical?

Lean 120

Lean Customer Development Business Model Agile 120

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

Steve Blank

JANUARY 26, 2016

Their R&D groups and contractors had the smartest domain experts who could design and manufacture the best systems. They can crowd-source designs, find components through eBay, fund through PayPal, train using virtual worlds and refine tactics, techniques and procedures using massive on-line gaming. We’re Our Own Worst Enemy.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Korea Agile Lean 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Mass blasts of information are ineffective, because the broadcast channels are suffering from information overload (even in social media). Test-marketing is now easier than ever before, thanks to leveraged distribution channels like AdWords and Facebook. There are too many products clamoring for attention.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

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. Yet every team did figure out how to conduct extensive out of building Customer Discovery. (By By design we didn’t give them too much Customer Development theory.

Intellectual Property 234

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 234

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. These damn models weren’t designed right so we’re fixing them on the line.” I coach agile teams for a living, and I do most of my work with start-ups.

Founder 302

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Again, its critical to focus your marketing launch on those publications, venues, and channels that your potential partners are paying attention to. Do some Customer Development instead. Dont chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Help you raise money. Dont scale.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168