Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

A version of this article previously appeared in Fortune. Or jet engine maintenance. More than any other company they have sufficient resources (cash on hand and engineering talent) to pivot their way to product/market fit in the real markets that need it. The product is an amazing technical tour de force.

Search 270

Search Marketing Forecast Burn Rate 270

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

A study done by SurveyMonkey and Search Engine Land found that brand name was the first thing people looked for when clicking on search engine results: Source. These don’t require coding skills—they’re usually visual templates that are easy to use but don’t allow for great customization (that would require technical skills).

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 126

SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

In this article I want to talk about some of the deep reasons why innovation is stifled at so many established companies. ” I first witnessed this many years ago when I was an engineer for HP, building platform and tool technology products for “the enterprise. They just make minor optimizations to existing products.

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. I want to add one last idea, even though I recognize it is controversial, bordering on the boundary between the CTO and VP Engineering. Heres my take.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more. I couldn’t care less about those.

Silicon Valley 266

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 266

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

This article first appeared in Poets and Quants. Textbooks, papers, and journal articles proliferated. A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Revolutions start by overturning the status quo. experiential.

Lean 435

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 435

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.

Customer Development 283

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. Focus on launching.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 A new version of the Joel Test (draft) (This article is a draft - your comments are especially welcome as I think through these issues. At IMVU , our engineering team accumulated thousands upon thousands of tests, and we had a build cluster (using BuildBot ) that ran them.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

The Next Web

MAY 4, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. Building a relationship prior to raising money is crucial and Mark Suster’s article on investing in lines vs. dots explains why perfectly. Usually this will be for a small Series-A.

San Francisco 159

San Francisco Europe Technical Review Due Diligence 159

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

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. I also knew our customers. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. steve Mark , on July 27, 2009 at 11:46 am Said: Thanks for the article Steve. In reality it would be another 20 years.)

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. This reverses the standard intuition about what engineering activities add value, which usually concludes that test coverage is a form of necessary waste but a refactoring is value-added work. These kinds of design are mostly orthogonal.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

for Harvard Business Review) Im excited to have just published the first of several articles on entrepreneurship for the Harvard Business Review online. Unlike previous cross-posting Ive done for blogs, where a lot of the discussion happens here, Id like to ask you to take a minute and click through to read the full article.

San Francisco 119

San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The discoveries in tube and circuit research suggested new electronic intelligence and countermeasure techniques and systems; in turn the needs of the Applied Lab pushed tube and circuit development. The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 146

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Thanks for writing this article.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Every time an engineer checks in code, they are batching up a certain amount of work.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

For the first 75 years of the 20 th century, when capital for new ventures was scarce, the smartest engineering talent went to corporate R&D labs. this article first appeared in the Peoples Daily.) Filed under: Corporate Innovation , Customer Development. Horizon 2 – extend their existing business model(s).

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. For more on how this plays into the process of scaling up, see the Customer Creation stage of the customer development model.) But in the meantime, by iterating on their product with customers, they have a chance to get there on their own.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 266

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 266

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce. Google Ventures (GV). 17% (13 / 80).

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

The core of the article is my first attempt to articulate the key metrics (in graph form) that I believe demonstrate customer value. When startups ask me what to measure, I always come back to these three as a starting point: Revenue per customer. You can read the article to find out why. Thanks for the article.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

What led you to become a subscriber, versus just reading an article and leaving like everybody else? (or, Labels: listening to customers 19comments: Ben said. In order to convince me, Id to see another link to an article here somewhere that I enjoyed. Read some articles, liked what I saw. How did you hear about it?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 133

Steve Blank

APRIL 26, 2010

It was an all day event devoted to the theory and practice of Lean Startups and Customer Development. It wasn’t until Eric Ries sat in my class and had the insight – that to actually implement Customer Development engineers needed to couple it with an agile methodology – that the theory turned into practice.

San Francisco 145

San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean Startup 145

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

They have hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers, world-class design studios, subject matter experts from supply chain to manufacturing. Of course, bringing startups (whether prospective or existing portfolio companies) closer to operating divisions has business and customer development benefits. Are they good sales people?

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

Witness, for example, this terrific Fast Company article on Bill Nguyen , serial entrepreneur who’s seventh startup “Color” famously raised $41m for a new mobile app before it even launched. GroupOn’s engine that turned capital into revenue growth was a form of force-feeding rather than building a product).

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Private Equity 240

Where to Play

MAY 28, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Lean 74

Lean Marketing Framework Business Model 74

rob.by

MARCH 8, 2012

Yesterday, Michael Pope posted an article titled Technical Cofounders Are a Myth. He argued that software engineers don’t finish what they start, and that you’re better off paying a technical person than partnering with one. He picked engineers who were technically-driven but not entrepreneurially-driven.

Technical Cofounder 42

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Engineering Fractional CTO 42

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

One hundred frustrated engineers were reporting to one overwhelmed senior executive. Each of Salesforce''s software teams was expected to complete a new software demo every 30 days, but every engineer was free to move to a new team without getting permission, which encouraged leaders to treat people well. What’s customer development?)

Lean 165

Lean San Francisco Cofounder Hosting 165

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. An excellent article and responses. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 20, 2010

Although the article is a bit me-centric, I think they did a good job capturing the fact that this is more than just the bloggers and writers, but represents a shift in thinking among entrepreneurs all over the world. The article includes comments from Kevin Dewalt and Drew Houston. Even Marc Andreessen weighs in.

Lean 153

Lean San Francisco Arlington Continuous Deployment 153

www.instigatorblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This is especially true when you think of a tech startup, where the first few hires are typically engineers/programmers. To make round numbers let's say you have 100,000 share outstanding and you give your lead engineer 1000. link] VC part 3: Engineers deserve more equity — Some French Guy [.] 1% is just not a lot.

Equity 41

Equity Employee Startup Vesting 41

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.

Lean 253

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 253

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. Eric Ries has a great article advocating for why it’s OK to Embrace Technical Debt.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47