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Solving the Innovator’s Dilemma – Customer Development in a Big Company

Steve Blank

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. So to get new divisions launched large optimistic forecasts are the norm. Lessons Learned.

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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

Given the stock market was buying “the story and vision” of anything internet, inflated expectations were more important than traditional metrics like customers, growth, revenue, or heaven forbid, profits. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan.

Lean 335
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Rising out of the Crisis: Where to Find New Markets and Customers

Steve Blank

As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Revenue models and forecasts are no longer valid. While there’s agreement that companies need to adapt to changing markets, rapidly find new markets, new customers and new revenue models, the question is how ?

Customer 436
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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

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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Search versus Execute

Steve Blank

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

Search 320
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NYU Commencement Speech 2016

Steve Blank

Yet everyone – investors, entrepreneurs, academics — expected new startups to follow the same practices that worked for large companies – write a business plan, forecast 5-year sales projections and build the product without ever talking to customers. The National Science Foundation adopted it.

Lean 221
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The Lean LaunchPad Educators Class

Steve Blank

I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. I read a ton of existing literature and came up with a formal methodology for search I called Customer Development. Berkeley asked me to teach a class in Customer Development at Haas business school. In 2003 U.C.

Lean 286