Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

Silicon Valley 176

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 176

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

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

bigs : @ericries says Stealth dev is a (undesirable, failure-presaging) customer-free zone. LeanStartup Of course, a big enabler of those kinds of mistakes is stealth-mode. Another recent meme that I hope more and more startups will take to heart: "stealth is a customer-free zone." jellytheory : Ask WHY?

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Think of a plane the length of a 767 airliner (but with 30 foot longer wings and 8 engines rather than 2) whose only mission was to FedEx 70,000 pounds of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method.

Silicon Valley 202

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Michigan 202

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

Oakland 327

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 327

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Build the product in stealth mode to build buzz for the eventual launch. But that was two full years before any customers were allowed to use it. Stealth is a customer-free zone. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. Nobody even asked the question: why not ship this now?

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150