Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

Currently a market leader, they’re watching a new and relentless competitor with more money, more people and more advanced technology appear seemingly out of nowhere, attempting to grab customers and gain market share. How do they convert existing manufacturing plants (and their workforce) for a completely new set of technologies?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. link] [link] I guess you could call it the “Continuous Wave Radio&# technology period. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C. Who would have known?

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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. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. Here the company executes a known business model (known customers, product features, competitors, pricing, distribution channel, supply chain, etc.)

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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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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.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile. The articles described the applications these users depended on and featured interviews with their most important customers. Cray Channels was describing my market, applications and customers for me.

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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.

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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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

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. Or blame my MarCom department who approved it.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2015

My guests this past week on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Pete Newell , managing partner of BMNT Partners. Matt Weingart, program development manager in the Strategic Development Office at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

We now have the tools, technology and data to take incubators and accelerators to the next level. Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. They invented a 9-step description of how ready a technology project was. We think we can do better.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2012

From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads. The Movie Industry and Technology Progress. With a new channel of distribution, home movie rentals surpassed movie theater tickets.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter –Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Lessons Learned.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

When venture capital teamed up with technology entrepreneurs in the 1960’s they brought with them the canonical MBA planning tool – the business plan. This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. Business Plan vs. Business Model + Customer Development.

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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 students were challenged to get users, orders, customers, etc.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

The class is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world. The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 26, 2016

Up until the dawn of the 21 st century, they defined military technology superiority. Our defense and intelligence community owned and/or could buy and deploy the most advanced technology in the world. Not only were they insulated from technological disruption, they were often also the disrupters. Its Not Just the Technology.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

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.) You are correct all channels, web or otherwise, need to generate awareness and leads. Messages, themes, demo’s.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. But the same technologies that make life difficult for traditional marketers also offer them unprecedented new opportunities.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. Most of the social and mobile channels (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Android) have emerged in just the past 3-5 years. Lean VC’s are expert in on-line distribution, Agile and Customer Development. Here’s why.

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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. And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship.

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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. The company burned its way through more than $5.2-billion

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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.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Channel is changed to Deployment.

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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. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Every startup faces multiple choices and decisions when it comes to technology. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Ad Serving Technology. Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. Agile project management. agile product management. Automates Agile / Scrum development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

There are other models, in other distribution channels. As the AppStore becomes increasingly saturated one of the goals of the socialDeck platform is to create an alternative distribution channel -- a way to drive installs of casual games outside of the AppStore oligopoly. On Facebook, viral distribution has proved decisive.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In the tactics section, list your sales channels and describe how you will be selling your products. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. You might also get immediate access to channels that might have otherwise taken years to break into. Use a development methodology.

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ReadWriteStart

MARCH 27, 2011

Flip startups are agile startups that aim to exit quickly. This is lean development without any customer development. In addition, channels such as Applifier, Appsumo or the Humble Indie Bundle have made it easy to reach large groups of users. The development part is similar to a lean startup: you want to be agile.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure. Given that most recruiting channels are pay-for-performance, its usually cheaper, too, because it has a lower conversion rate. Sounds a little abstract, though, doesnt it? Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

At some point in my career as I began to formulate thoughts about mission and intent , I started to think about the broader role of marketing in a growing technology company. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. Who’s on the Sharp End?

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YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 17, 2016

Salesforce recently conducted research , which found nearly 25 per cent of millennials expect to get a response within 10 minutes of reaching out for customer service via social media and nearly one quarter will boycott a company after one bad experience. According to our research, millennials ardently avoid calling customer service.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

whorunsgov : Eric Ries: Startups fail not because the technology works, but because no one wants the tech. g2s The very abbreviated version of Customer Development (channeling Steve Blank ). Its natural at a gathering like this to focus on new technology and applications. once it launches. Startup=Experiment.

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