Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? The idea of exploitation versus exploration was central in my own work in building the lean methodology for start-ups. So we built our own tools to enable founders to rapidly translate their vision into hypotheses and then into validated facts.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

crowdSPRING Blog

MAY 30, 2014

The 39 Best Pieces of Sales Advice You’ll Hear This Year – crowdspring.co/1ojWm1U. The 39 Best Pieces of Sales Advice You’ll Hear This Year – crowdspring.co/1ojWm1U. How much do Y Combinator founders earn? The 39 Best Pieces of Sales Advice You’ll Hear This Year – crowdspring.co/1ojWm1U.

Social Media 93

Social Media Small Business Design Media 93

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders belief. We dont just abandon the vision of the company at every turn.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. Oh yes, and retail sales doubled with the new product packaging.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. But here’s where a truly great sales artist comes in. Go on an agile diet quickly. More on that in a moment.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing has been very active in the Lean Startup movement. With case studies like this, we aim to illustrate specific Lean Startup techniques through the stories of current practitioners. Andy Mathieson, a founder and managing member at Fairview Capital , was particularly supportive. The response was surprisingly positive.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned. The board raises a collective eyebrow.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 31, 2010

Every founder frets about competition from a big company, me included. It was the little precambrian warm-blooded agile (oh sorry, now we're saying "lean") rodents who adapted by getting "outside the nest" to discover how to eat cockroaches, because we all know that cockroaches are the one form of life that can survive anything.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork. Reconciling these principles requires a little humility.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

When I first encountered agile software techniques, in the form of extreme programming , I thought I had found the answer. I explained it to people this way: agile lets you make the trade-offs visible to whole company, so that they can make informed choices. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. In building the program for this year’s Lean Startup Conference , we’ve tried to strike a balance. To give you a sense of these practitioners, we asked some our new speakers to talk about how they use Lean Startup methods. Below are three of their takes on MVPs.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 15, 2008 The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time Split-testing is a core lean startup discipline, and its one of those rare topics that comes up just as often in a technical context as in a business-oriented one when Im talking to startups. Expo SF (May. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. for Harvard Business Revie.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2019

Lean LaunchPad class developed for Stanford. And the Lean LaunchPad class I developed at Stanford was the first such class. I believe the analogy is identical for entrepreneurship.The capstone entrepreneurship classes like NSF I-Corps or a Lean LaunchPad class, are for those who have already decided they want to be entrepreneurs.

Incubator 331

Incubator Lean Programming Government 331

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. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Amazing lean startup resources Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Where to Play

APRIL 8, 2018

The post 5 Steps to Strengthen your Lean Startup Experimentations appeared first on Where to Play. Before you ‘get out of the building’: How to adopt a top-down orientation to improve your lean startup experimentations. Lean Startup , by Steve Blank and Eric Ries , is a great bottom-up approach.

Lean 73

Lean Startup Artificial Inteligence Search 73

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the issues that came up is whether the new lexicon of entrepreneurial ideas – Customer Development, Business Model Design , Lean , Lean LaunchPad class, etc. The processes used to organize and implement the search for the business model are Customer Development and Agile Development. Organization.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2011

The Lean Startup Book is done. The finished book will come out on September 13, featuring an amazing cover designed by my IMVU co-founder Marcus Gosling and refined and tested by so many of you. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

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Lean Startup Metrics Private Equity 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

As a founder you start out with: 1) a vision of a product with a set of features, 2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Sort of…but better.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

I got a powerful taste of datablindness recently, as I’ve started to work with various large companies as partners in setting up events, speeches, and other products to sell around the Lean Startup concept. For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

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.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Where to Play

APRIL 8, 2018

The post 5 Steps to Strengthen your Lean Startup Experimentations appeared first on Where to Play. Before you ‘get out of the building’: How to adopt a top-down orientation to improve your lean startup experimentations. Lean Startup , by Steve Blank and Eric Ries , is a great bottom-up approach.

Lean 48

Lean Startup Artificial Inteligence Search 48

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

Hershey just bought Krave Jerky, a team in our 2011 Berkeley Lean LaunchPad class, for >$200 million. These new entrants disrupted their food categories by offering high quality proprietary recipes, outsourcing their manufacturing, and using their cash and resources on sales and marketing to build distribution and a differentiated brand.

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North America Lean Customer Development Distribution 120

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 16, 2017

If you are a founder, then you already know the odds are against you. As Zappos founder, Tony Hsieh said ‘chase the vision, not the money and the money will end up following you.’. Too many founders neglect to focus on cash flow. In turn, this will help you to be lean and more agile than your competition.

Startup 124

Startup Agile Lean Acquisition 124

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

Bob looked wistful, “Our founders built a company known for taking risks and moving fast. More agile competitors are starting to eat into our business. They’ve figured out the revenue model (subscription, license, direct sale, etc.) There are proven Lean innovation methodologies that work in large existing companies.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

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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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Altgate

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

But did you know that founder Markus Frind has just 3 employees for his $10MM+ revenue business? The servers are in the cloud, his advertising sales is with Google, etc. The reason is that putting a sales force in the field with limited inventory is very, very expensive. I’d love to get involved in Founders Institute.

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Software Review Offshore Startup Boston 65

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Its a key lean startup concept. Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. For example, I recently created a customer validation exercise around the Lean Startup Workshop.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, October 30, 2008 John Doerrs 10 lean startup tips I just saw video of John Doerrs talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn&# roundtable event. What I find remarkable about this list is how many of them apply to lean startups in good times and in bad.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 8, 2016

While there are dozens of lessons I could take away from these entrepreneurs’ experiences, I want to highlight three common mistakes founders make in the early stages of a startup. So it is no surprise that many founders put off implementing financial record keeping, monitoring, and budgeting. But this is a mistake. Be compliant.

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Entrepreneur Software Review Balance Sheet Partner 60

YoungUpstarts

MAY 3, 2013

by Mike Broderick, co-founder and CEO of Turning Technologies. Finding the right employees and creating an agile, focused team is essential to business success. Chances are, they have also made a deep commitment to their business strategy and persevered through many lean years before they ultimately succeeded. They are correct.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. I called the founder and noted that there are SAT tests that are shorter than the survey. Customer Development suggests that founders have continual and timely customer, channel and market information.

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 28, 2017

You will also likely need help along the way, whether it comes in the form of a co-founder or a product team. This type of agile thinking is what matters. The most common objection to this pre-sale (or smoke test) process is that customers will be upset that full functionality is not available. Idea: Problem, Pain, Passion.

Product 48

Product Audience Stock Conversion 48

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. The goal was commercial products, but as scientists and engineers the company’s founders realized that at times the cost of experimentation was failure. Scientists and Engineers as Founders.

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Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 305