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. Lets see why.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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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 Silicon Valley Customer 227

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? Customer behavior changes?

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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? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

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. So what did you do?

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 315

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.

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Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 329

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

If you can’t see the slide presentation above, click here.). VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. With Netscape’s IPO , there was suddenly a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter –Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Watch their Lesson Learned presentation below.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination. Yet year after year, decade after decade, VC’s would watch as no startup business plan survived first contact with customers. It takes a ton of face-face customer interactions.

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Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 266

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. What is customer development?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) In fact, for decades if you drew this diagram on day one of a startup VC’s would nod sagely and everyone would get to work heading to first customer ship. The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 250

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money. And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

A good general manager is expected to use all the tools at their disposal — market research, competitive analysis, customer focus groups — to figure out a plan that will work. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. It turned out that, during the course of the decline, one customer segment was losing customers while another was gaining customers. The company struggled mightily with how to explain this bad news to their board.

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

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. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

In fact, by the start of class they had ~$750K in revenue for 2011 – not quite Facebook but a nice small business. Rising to the occasion Jon and the team got out of the building and went to the Sonoma County Fair and Wine and other food festivals, and spoke to 50 customers. What Do You Mean You Only Spoke to 1 Customer?

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North America Lean Customer Development Distribution 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2012

from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. Ironically, it was Valenti’s skill in hobbling competitive innovation that negated any need for studios to develop agility, vision and technology leadership.

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Silicon Valley Distribution Washington Channel 336

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Now with customers and early revenue, it was out raising its first round of venture money. Not only did their sales curve look like a textbook case of a VC-friendly hockey stick, but their Lessons Learned funding presentation was an eye-opener.). Customer and Agile development to find the business model.

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Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 296

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Not even if its generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. Not everything has to follow lean startup and customer development principles, and I write that as a devoted practitioner of both. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Here at Palo Alto Software in 2007 and 2008, we embraced these planning concepts and moved towards a more agile planning process. Also, the “customer relationships” section didn’t seem to fit for many traditional businesses. At the time, we used Business Plan Pro and Basecamp for this. Do startups have a manual?

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Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. The Proof Is In The Revenue. Your First Iteration of an Idea Will Be Wrong. What went wrong? Hiring The Right Candidate.

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. Great post, Eric. January 29, 2009 12:08 AM Mahesh said. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

The agile software movement has made numerous contributions: continuous integration, which helps accelerate feedback about defects; story cards and kanban that reduce batch size; a daily stand-up that increases tempo. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

So let’s turn our attention from what may happen in the future to what is definitely happening in the present. What is the right revenue model? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I used to be skeptical of all this talk of “personal brand.&# Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first? For more on how to figure out which question applies in which context, see Business ecology and the four customer currencies.) And therein lies the most common source of confusion about whether startups should listen to customers.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Steve Blank

JANUARY 14, 2010

I argue that as a scalable startup grows from a garage into a Google, it progresses through three distinct stages – each presenting a unique set of challenges and decisions – and each requiring vastly different resources, skills and strategy. They only differed by timing or scale. would be inside the box to the left.

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Laos Startup Business Model Early Stage 290

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Continuous deployment offers three significant advantages over large batch development systems. Some of these benefits are shared by agile systems which have continuous integration but large batch releases, but others are unique to continuous deployment. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68