The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

Since many businesses now take advantage of the benefits of remote workers, it’s important to understand how to manage a remote team. When you outsource your IT projects or hire an offshore development team, it comes with many benefits. Cost-savings with the more affordable developer and IT project manager salary.

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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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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

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) This Stanford class will introduce management tools for entrepreneurs. We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

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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.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

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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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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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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. He had introduced the idea that customers don’t buy a product, rather than they hire it for a “job to be done.”

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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. 9) Accountability. 10) Leadership.

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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. StageGate Process.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" I always assumed I wouldnt manage anybody. Being a manager didnt sound fun - deep down, who really wants to be held accountable for other peoples actions? So I wound up learning the discipline of managing other people.

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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. He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject. It was a management problem.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Id like to talk about a technique Ive used to help manage this growth without slowing down. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers. Managers in this area have to take a portfolio approach, promoting ideas that work and might make good candidates for further investment. Expo SF (May.

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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? So much for timing.

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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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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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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. It means someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

And, as you can see in my previous post on “ The cardinal sin of community management &# the feedback could be all over the map. But we had some super-active customers who would act as editors, collecting feedback from all over the community and synthesizing it into a report of the top issues. It was absolutely worth it.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

Its even more critical in lean startups when they need to manage growth. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? What is customer development? Expo SF (May.

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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 no standards for what each side (board versus management) does. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. Wastes Founders Time.

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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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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.

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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 no standards for what each side (board versus management) does. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. Wastes Founders Time.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

As a consumer internet company with millions of customers, it may seem to have little relevancy for an enterprise software company with only a handful of potential customers, or a computer security company whose customers demand a rigorous audit before accepting a new release. It’s really a lot of fun.

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

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Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

This changed their interest from managing your board for their liquidity to managing the board for all shareholders. Some of the old-line venture firms have changed their strategy, but some are still locked into last decade’s model while the partners are living off of their management fees and go through cargo cult like rituals.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

It has to be found and managed. In that same spirit, here are some suggestions for tactics you can use to increase the leverage of your product development efforts: Free and open source software (and even hardware ). For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. Periodic or on-demand reports are one possibility, but we can do much better. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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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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YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 17, 2016

Instead, Facebook is the most popular social channel for customer service questions and is used twice as often as Twitter, which is the second most-used social media site. If you don’t have social as part of your customer service strategy, your business is missing out.

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 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. The process, which Blank detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany," uses customer feedback to refine and improve a product before scaling a business. Here's how.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 11, 2010

You can view previous entries: Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand. You can view previous entries: Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? Expo SF (May.

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andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. If you liked this post, please subscribe or follow me on Twitter. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Should you focus on brand managers or agency buyers? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Balancing competing objectives is a recurring theme on this blog - its the central challenge of all management decisions. The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. The six key attributes spell ABCDEF: Agility.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration. In a lot of cases, this requires a lot of energy invested in talking to customers or metrics and analytics. I do this as a core part of the Product Management process I use at all startups. Iterate quickly to uncover true market demands. Thanks Eric.

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