Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, August 26, 2009 Building a new startup hub Last week, I had a unique opportunity to spend some time in Boulder at the behest of TechStars. It was a great experience to see a relatively new startup hub in action - and thriving. Their model looks like a key ingredient in the startup brew there.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. Gore , I’ve found two corporate strategy tools developed by other smart people helpful in bridging Lean Startups with Corporate Innovation.

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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

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 30, 2009 Techstars brings The Lean Startup to Boulder Im very excited to announce a pair of events that will kick off a very busy fall speaking tour. The event will include a talk from Eric on The Lean Startup over dinner, followed by moderated table discussion and then final Q&A with Eric.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Don’t startups exist for the same reason?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. Here’s one possible explanation – Job titles in a startup mean something different than titles in a large company. Startups Need Different Titles to Search For an Unknown Business Model.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Startups and Sales If you read this post you can come away with the impression that every startup with a direct salesforce needs a consultative sales team. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? what Market Type is your startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, June 9, 2009 The Lean Startup Tokyo edition I had a blast speaking at Startonomics Tokyo , which was organized to foster ties between the startup cultures in Japan and Silicon Valley. ericnakagawa : Show of hands how many in startup here? Startups need to spend time with these customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, June 5, 2009 It’s a startup, not a spreadsheet Some people, when they start to realize the power of using data to inform their decisions, become obsessed with optimization. Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer. But this is wrong, too.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. It’s time to ask why startup board governance has failed to keep pace with innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. It’s time for a change.

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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. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. Once a startup gets going, it has asymmetric information. Here’s how.

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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. A kite-boarding startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Most of the people building our product werent themselves target customers. So there was simply no substitute for seeing actual customers with the product, live. Today, when I talk to startup founders, the most common answer I get to the question "do you talk to your customers?" Dont confuse passion with volume.

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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. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. Once a startup gets going, it has asymmetric information. Here’s how.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. For bigger booths a good rule of thumb is to have two to four staffers for every 100 square feet of exhibit space. Even for the smallest trade show, no one shows up without booth training.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

For the rest of us, there is an alternative: to create credibility by building a lean startup. At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category. Startup blogging was hardly "cool" back then.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. We still struggle to create Firm software that is defect-free, and it still requires customer insight (and maybe some customer development) to discover what will Delight.

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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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Thanks to those of you who were willing to fill out the survey, I learned my net promoter score (about 25) as well as some clear other segmentation insights: about 80% of you are founders of or work at a startup, you read many of the same other blogs, and many of you would like to engage with Lessons Learned in formats and venues beyond this blog.

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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. Board meetings that guide startups haven't changed since the early 1900's. Once a startup gets going, it has asymmetric information. Here's how.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 24, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, February 24, 2009 The lean startup at UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Image by Jessica_Mah via Flickr Last week I had the opportunity to lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at Haas, which is always a great learning experience - for me at least! Eric takes a different approach.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 17, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, April 17, 2010 Sneak preview, KISSmetrics (and more) Hear the CEO of KISSmetrics give a sneak preview of what hell be presenting at the Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23 (were less than a week away!): Conference updates continue to pour in: Want to see more preview videos?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 12, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, June 12, 2009 Lean Startup Workshop scholarship program I havent had much time to write lately, and so havent been able to share much about the Lean Startup Workshop series I have been producing with OReilly in their Master Class division. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, August 20, 2009 The Promise of the Lean Startup Im honored to have a guest post on GigaOm to introduce the concept of the lean startup to their audience. The ultimate goal of a lean startup is to identify where its vision intersects with what reality can accommodate.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

Pete Newell and I were working with a company that was getting its butt kicked from near-peer competitors as well as from a wave of well-funded insurgent startups. This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. Lessons Learned.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Their presentation looked like this: Market/Opportunity Lessons Learned Slide 1 Lessons Learned Slide 2 Lessons Learned Slide 3 Why We’re Here Telling the Cafepress Customer Discovery and Customer Validation story allowed Fred and Maheesh to take the VC’s on their journey year by year. Your results may vary.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, March 13, 2009 Dont launch Heres a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Do some Customer Development instead. Help you raise money.

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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. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.”

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Of course, 1000 customers is pretty pathetically small too. When startups achieve that milestone, its a mixed blessing. Do you have a particular set of early adopters that share some common traits? If so, they might be pointing the way towards a much bigger set of people who share those traits, but are not early adopters.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

The startup founder who gets fired just as his/her company is growing into large company could be a cliché – if it wasn’t so true – and painful. Scalable Startups at Adolescence. In our previous post we posited that Scalable Startups are designed to become large companies. Let’s take a look at why.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures. Startup Culture. Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA……………… 5. Speed and Tempo – Fearless Decision Making for Startups… 16.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. A Lean Startup methodology offers entrepreneurs a framework to focus on what’s important: Business Model Discovery.

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