Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc.

Silicon Valley 302

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. And since there was no Venture Capital in the 1950′s/’60′s where was the money coming from? The HP and Agilent credit union is called “Addison Avenue&#. Why was it occurring here?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. Can you recognize and capitalize on them? Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. Get customers first.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Cray’s first customers were the U.S. At Ardent our hypothesis was that if we could build a desktop supercomputer powerful enough to run and display these numerical simulations there were enough customers to make this a big business. I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

Technology 139

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We can’t bring customers to this rundown building. The Curse of a New Building At some point in my career as I began to ponder how/why startups morph from agile, “can do&# companies to [.] [.] I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building&# debacle I had a hand in.

Silicon Valley 212

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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. A few successful ones do all these things.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 263

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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. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Customers will get to consume the content they want, and support the producers of that content directly, rather than having to rely exclusively on intermediaries. Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. There are just too many of them out there. But guess what?

San Francisco 113

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) Yet decades later the military lacked the agility to write a spec in two years, let alone get 10′s of thousands of new systems deployed on aircraft as Terman had done. How was this possible?

Silicon Valley 185

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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. Handspring’s customers understood what a Personal Digital Assistant was.

Customer Development 203

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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. Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc.

Founder 302

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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. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) That’s 10x what many websites convert.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. By 1961 its customers now included our intelligence agencies. There were no venture investors. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. The “customers” in Washington had never seen anything like it.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 1, 2021

Founded in 2009 by JoeBen Bevert, Joby Aviation has been working under the radar at a base in Santa Cruz, California to develop an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Our model here at RTP is to deliver “venture capital at scale.” Joby plans to start taking paying customers in 2024.

Merger 28

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Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2009

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley « Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA Rocket Science 2: Drinking the Kool-Aid » 2 Responses Ben , on July 1, 2009 at 2:31 pm Said: Great post Steve. I can’t get this one out of my head. during World War II.

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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. And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation.

Silicon Valley 169

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

College Dropouts - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison These guys realized that customers don’t ask for your transcript. You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] You just get successful.

Silicon Valley 329

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Rapid Scan/High Probability of Intercept – Stanford’s contribution In the last post we described Stanford’s high power, electronically tuned microwave tubes (the Backward Wave Oscillator ) which made high power, frequency agile airborne jammers possible. He sold the company to Teledyne in 1965.

Silicon Valley 158

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

But unlike the majority of existing tube manufacturers in the valley who were making products for radios, Stanford Electronics Research Lab tube group had a special customer with very special needs – the U.S. Air Force also needed improvements in frequency agility to protect its cold war bombers.

Silicon Valley 147

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Sometimes it was the legal department crafting contracts so onerous I wouldn’t even sign it, let alone expect a customer to do so.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. Given we consciously worked hard not to, here’s what we were thinking. Do the right thing.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2009

The reality is that independent electric vehicle startups will win over time (closer to the customer, more agile, etc.) Martin , on April 15, 2009 at 9:38 am Said: But the biggest problem with the Volt is that customers don’t want electric cars right now. But they’re smart, let’s see what happens.) improvement system.

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] Reply Gravity Will Be Turned Off « Avid Editor’s Insights , on May 17, 2009 at 1:31 am Said: [.] entire story can be found at Steve Blank. It’s worth a few minutes time off from reaming [.]

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method. Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] Reply Ben C. , The invention of electronic warfare, part I and II. [.]

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blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

If you want to serve enterprise customers,NET is one of the best ways to do that and do it well. The tools which you find restrictive I consider a huge timesaver (which paying customers tend to appreciate)… they allow me to rapidly prototype and get solutions to customers. It’s like arguing against vertical software.

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