Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s. This methodology improved on waterfall by building software iteratively and involving the customer. With Agile you could end up satisfying every feature a customer asked for and still go out of business.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

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

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

These tools—Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and Business Model design—became the lean start-up methodology , a rigorous approach to testing hypotheses and building prototypes, and, on the basis of data and evidence, adjusting or pivoting to a variant of the original hypothesis.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

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. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Teams talk to 10-15 customers a week and make a minimum of 100 customer visits.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

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Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering).

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Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Finally, I’ll write about 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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

When you outsource your IT projects or hire an offshore development team, it comes with many benefits. For example, an agile software development lifecycle model encourages self-organization and motivation rather than the delegation of authority and a seniority hierarchy. This model has shown higher productivity levels.

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Developer Offshore Software Developers Software Development 93

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.

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Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Agile software development. Agile allows companies to build higher quality software faster. Customer development.

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Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

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 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

They operated this way because their existing business models didn’t allow them to initially profit from those opportunities – so they ignored them – and continued to chase higher profitability in more-demanding segments. Reading The Innovator’s Dilemma was a revelation. When I finished, I must have had 25 pages of notes.

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Lean Business Model Government Agile 428

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

How do we create end user demand? Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. How Does Customer Development, Agile Development and Lean Startups Fit?

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Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. to optimize this search. What are hypotheses?

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. I remember being immediately struck by how different we designed and built technology, versus how our customers did. 5) Funding. 6) Process.

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Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

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. existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups. This is a big idea.

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

But the bubble mantra of get “big fast” and “first mover advantage” demanded tens of millions more to create a “brand.” Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Startups still required millions of dollars of funding.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Your design or ad agencies can impress you with their awards, but if you’re not moving product or creating demand, you’ve missed the point.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

What those sites have in common (despite their very different audiences) is that something is causing their customers to become addicted to their product, and so no matter how they acquire a new customer, they tend to keep them. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 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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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 20, 2014

The Lean LaunchPad class teaches students how to build a Lean Startup using business model design, customer development and agile engineering. Teams have to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week.) However, going through the customer development process showed me the danger in that kind of thinking.

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Lean New York City New York Customer Development 269

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? Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? By delegating and training, we create a corps of leaders who could step in to provide CTO-like services on demand. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

They used Customer and Agile development to search for a scalable and repeatable business model to become a large company. A scalable startup typically requires external “risk&# capital to create market demand and scale. Customer and Agile development to find the business model.

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Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 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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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

Distribution, Demand Creation and Partnerships. Customer Discovery. 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

Intellectual Property 226

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 226

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.)

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Customers kept demanding that we add this or that IM feature, and we were routinely refusing. We were afraid that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that once we “gave in&# to these five demands there would be five more, ad infinitum. Every time you listen to customers, you fear diluting your vision.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 290

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. Struggling to explain the successes and failures of those companies, I discussed principles like continuous deployment, customer development, and a hyper-accelerated form of agile.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

Silicon Valley 258

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 258

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. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

New, agile and adroit venture firms with new business models have emerged to deal with the reality that 1) web 2.0 In either case Customer Development provides entrepreneurs with a methodology for being capital efficient. You need a plan for partnership and long term funding from day one. We live in interesting times.

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Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 297