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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

Dave was building a mobile app for matching college students who needed to move within a local area with potential local movers. As the farm fields flew by on the interstate I listened as Dave described how he translated his vision into a series of hypotheses and mapped them onto a business model canvas. Customer Discovery.

Cofounder 336
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The Virus Survival Strategy For Your Startup

Steve Blank

The questions every startup or small business CEO needs to ask now are: What’s my Burn Rate and Runway? What does your new business model look like? Burn Rate and Runway. To answer the first question, take stock of your current gross burn rate i.e. how much cash are you spending each month.

Burn Rate 436
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It Must Be A Marketing Problem

Steve Blank

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. In Discovery startups take all their hypotheses about the business model: product, market, customers, channel, etc. Six is a Proxy for Burn Rate.

Burn Rate 248
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Apple Vision Pro – Tech in the Search of a Market

Steve Blank

In addition, they’ve created an entirely new $85+ billion subscription business model; the App Store, iTunes, Apple Care, Apple Pay, Apple Cash, Apple Arcade, Apple Music, Apple TV. It’s hard to remember, but the first version of these products launched with serious limitations that follow-on versions remedied.

Search 256
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Crisis Management by Firing Executives – There’s A Better Way

Steve Blank

A business plan has a set of assumptions (who’s the customer, what’s the price, what’s the channel, what are the product features that matter, etc.) that make up a business model. Yet by first customer ship most of the business model hasn’t been validated or tested. Pivots By Firing Executives.

Burn Rate 247
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Vision versus Hallucination – Founders and Pivots

Steve Blank

Tossing their agile development process and at times their entire business model in the air, the company would go into fire-drill mode and engineering would start working on whatever his latest insight was. ” “A pivot is a substantive change to one or more of components to your business model.

Founder 316
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Adding Slides Does Not Enhance Your Investor Pitch

Startup Professionals Musings

Investors like $1B markets with double-digit growth rates. Business model. Make sure your marketing budget matches the scope of your plan. Show breakeven point, burn rate, and growth assumptions. Define the characteristics of the overall industry, market forces, market dynamics, and customer landscape.