Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual. The cost of attending a Startup Weekend Next is ridiculously inexpensive.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Given the stock market was buying “the story and vision” of anything internet, inflated expectations were more important than traditional metrics like customers, growth, revenue, or heaven forbid, profits. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders. Wireframes.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyers and sellers.) The news from customers was not good. talk to more customers? Which value added services do public clouds want to attract customers for?

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. The Lean LaunchPad class uses the three “ Lean Startup ” principles: Alexander Osterwalders “ business model canvas ” to frame hypotheses.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

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? How do should startups do it? You certainly do!

Customer 413

Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. We were positing that 20 years of teaching “how to write a business plan” might be obsolete. This post is part one.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Build a product, get it into the real world, measure customers’ reactions and behaviors, learn from this, and use what you’ve learned to build something better. Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 6, 2014

Our Lean LaunchPad class requires student teams to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week while they’re building the product. The class is designed for students who said they want a hands-on experience in what it takes to build a startup – not just writing a business plan or listening to lectures.

Lean 278

Lean Customer Development Business Model Email 278

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

—— When I wrote Four Steps to the Epiphany and the Startup Owners Manual , I believed that Life Sciences startups didn’t need Customer Discovery. What we found is that during the class almost all of them pivoted - making substantive changes to one or more of their business model canvas components.

SBIR 314

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 314

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “. If so, the business world is full of specialists who are all too eager to help. Talented product developers. Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Are you ready to grow your company?

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. Here’s what happened when an extraordinary Digital Health team gained several critical insights about their business model. The class has talked to ~2,200 customers to date. A Five-sided Market.

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ The old paradigm works like this: Your company produces goods and services that help customers get a job done. In return, the customers pay you money. The new approach makes so much more sense.

Customer 168

Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

This isn’t just about having a eureka moment; it’s about understanding the problem you’re solving and why it matters to your potential customers. Designing Your Business Model Crafting a business model is like building a blueprint for your venture.

Intellectual Property 128

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 128

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

The first, the notion of the “ ambidextrous organization ” from O’Reilly and Tushman , posits that companies that want to do continuous innovation need to execute their core business model while innovating in parallel. Horizon 1 activities support existing business models. Horizon 1 is the company’s core business.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. ” How many times have you heard someone agree that “it would be great if someone did X,” but when show them someone did do X, but it costs $39.99, they don’t buy? simple enough to be self-service).

Bootstrapping 294

Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

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.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world.

Silicon Valley 222

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 222

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of this century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models, while startups search for scalable business models. This new framework can act as the front-end of Customer Development.

Lean 333

Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As we prepared for the new Hacking for Defense class at Stanford, we had to stop and ask ourselves: How do we use the Business Model Canvas if the primary goal is not to earn money, but to fulfill a mission? In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue?

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

The moment I saw the product I knew every one of my professional graphics customers (ad agencies, freelancers, photo studios, etc.) But every graphics professional did own a CDROM drive but most didn’t own a high-resolution film scanner – and PhotoCD would have been perfect for them – and the perfect launch customer.

Search 256

Search Marketing Forecast Burn Rate 256

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies. All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost. So we’ve learned to live with our customers. Crop Dusters. Lessons Learned.

Customer 316

Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 316

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). And going for crowdfunding before you do customer discovery with customers can lock you into the wrong idea too early. We’ve had folks where they are in between jobs or their hours have been cut.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Market segments drive your business model.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2011

By now the nine teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad Class were formed, In the four days between team formation and this class session we tasked them to: Write down their initial hypotheses for the 9 components of their company’s business model (who are the customers? what’s the product? what distribution channel?

Business Model 236

Business Model Nebraska Peru Germany 236

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, – the business model – is what turns a product into a business. using the business model canvas as the framework. Reflection Week.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

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 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

JANUARY 14, 2014

A pivot can change any of nine different things in your business model. A pivot may mean you changed your customer segment, your channel, revenue model/pricing, resources, activities, costs, partners, customer acquisition – lots of other things than just the product. Business Model.

Business Model 330

Business Model Lean Customer Development Channel 330

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

There’s nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. With 317 million people the U.S. Trip 2 to the U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

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? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. They are gaining valuable customer data.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully-formed go to market function.”. Then, pluck the low-hanging fruit: easy, low-cost, and highly scalable infrastructure. Customer Development. Organize events in your vertical. Is the service scaleable?

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

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 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.). In contrast, startups search for a business model. (Or Their objective is to get users, orders, customers, etc.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The class teaches the three basic skills all entrepreneurs need to know: business model design. customer development. Some general customer development slides click here. They don’t ask for equity and charge just enough to cover the costs of pizza and the room rental. agile engineering. Find it here.

Open Source 335

Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

These resulting business models made them look incredibly profitable. They knew how to execute the current business model. ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2012

Enter the Business Model Canvas. With the business model canvas in hand, we can now approach rethinking corporate innovation strategy and structure. Existing companies and their operating divisions implement known business models. Operating divisions execute the known business model.

Business Model 333

Business Model Customer Development United States Operations 333

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 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138