Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

Burn Rate 249

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 249

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

The Founder’s New Insight Smart founders are never satisfied with simply executing their current business model, they are constantly observing, orienting and deciding whether their current business model can be made better. It’s a natural part of learning about your customers and business model.)

Customer 201

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 201

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

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. It doesn’t.

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Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building? How many are there?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

But to do it, you need to actually have a sustainable business model. Starting a business is too risky. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. The problem was had the wrong business model at the time. Our revenue model was wrong. It’s too hard.

Cofounder 143

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 143

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

But to do it, you need to actually have a sustainable business model. Starting a business is too risky. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. The problem was had the wrong business model at the time. Our revenue model was wrong. It’s too hard.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Luckily (or maybe because we were in Silicon Valley where there was a domain expert for everything) there was a very smart consultant in the retail computer space, Seymour Merrin, who preached about the importance of packaging. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

In cohort one, 25 teams chosen from a field of 100+, worked fulltime for eight weeks to take their ideas from a “cocktail napkin” business idea to a viable, scalable business model. Amazingly by the end of the program’s eighth week, 8 of the 25 teams had customer revenue.

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Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 322

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) Each of our teams in this class followed the canonical Lean model: Articulate your hypotheses using the business model canvas.

Artificial Inteligence 320

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 320

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

In cohort one, 25 teams chosen from a field of 100+, worked fulltime for eight weeks to take their ideas from a “cocktail napkin” business idea to a viable, scalable business model. Amazingly by the end of the program’s eighth week, 8 of the 25 teams had customer revenue.

Colombia 278

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 278

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

In this post we’re going to offer a new definition of why startups exist : a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. A Business Model. Ok, but what is a business model ? A business model describes how your company creates, delivers and captures value.

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Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The old rules of sustainable revenue and consistent profitability went out the window.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Over time the idea that winners in new markets are the ones who have been the first (not just early) entrants into their categories became unchallenged conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. Google is a $25 billion dollar company with most of its revenue from AdWords. Implicit Customer Discovery and Validation in Fast Followers.

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Silicon Valley Differentiation United States Customer Development 319

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. Quickly iterate the product in front of customers. Here’s why.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 260

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

. - Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. Two studies have shown that only about 10 percent of promoters actually refer profitable new customers.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money). Yet this system isn’t perfect. – seems like another planet.

Engineer 280

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 280

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) Each of our teams in this class followed the canonical Lean model: Articulate your hypotheses using the business model canvas.

Artificial Inteligence 120

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 120

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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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 1, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. This approach would shape Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money). Until today. Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the $6.8-billion

Silicon Valley 118

Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Balance Sheet Lean 118

Steve Blank

MAY 5, 2016

There’s a Death Valley of startups trying to do business with schools and teachers. Well, here we are with $5 million in annual revenues and we’re a consumer company that starts with teachers first, and we don’t charge them a dime. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Brazil 160

Brazil Entrepreneur Cleveland Cofounder 160

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. For the first 25 years HP’s business model was static. Reply Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply.

Silicon Valley 169

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 169

Steve Blank

MAY 5, 2016

There’s a Death Valley of startups trying to do business with schools and teachers. Well, here we are with $5 million in annual revenues and we’re a consumer company that starts with teachers first, and we don’t charge them a dime. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Brazil 120

Brazil Entrepreneur Cleveland Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

This week, the startup tribe from Harvard Business School is making their annual trek to Silicon Valley. It’s a common refrain around Silicon Valley to disparage the role of MBA’s in entrepreneurship. That’s why I am so excited about a new course that is debuting this year at Harvard Business School.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Lean Planning is a set of tools for discovering a business model that works, building an action plan to test your assumptions, creating financial models and a plan for a viable business, and tracking your performance so you can adjust your plan on the fly, quickly and easily. Do startups have a manual?

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Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. few years ago I also started following Alexander Osterwalder in his blog about his Business Model Generation -mantra.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2010

The company had innovated, found a business model, grown successfully but now even as revenues continued to grow, the company was slowly but surely dying. The other founder, the business guy, managed to get its product legislated into consumer electronics devices. It was impressive. More on this in another post.).

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Cofounder Acquisition Kansas 269

ConversionXL

JANUARY 28, 2013

Steve Blank , a Silicon Valley mentor and serial-entrepreneur, recognized for developing the customer development methodology, says it best: No plan survives first contact with customers. Sure, he was talking about business models and business plans, but it applies to websites as well.

Conversion 106

Conversion Silicon Valley Matching Design 106

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2018

We describe their efforts as “heroic” because all the established procedures and processes in a large company are primarily designed to execute and support the current business model. Some examples of innovation tools are Customer Development, Design Thinking, User-Centric Design, Business Model Canvas, Storytelling, etc.

Programming 322

Programming Incubator Leadership Silicon Valley 322

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

We were focused on revenue, but we didnt understand that revenue is not important for its own sake in an early stage company. No business model, either. And then, at my first Silicon Valley startup , I watched friends get laid off in successive waves as it started to fail. What was different this time?

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

All teams raised their hands and screamed: we hundreds of angels and dozens of VCs, all of them say they will only fund deals with prototypes, beta customers, first revenue and executive teams all in place, and they say it will be 2 years from now because their coffers are out of cash and LPs in default. Yeah, I said. Order Here.

Vertical 151

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 151

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. The one-page pitch format is also more suitable for SaaS businesses that are constantly testing new ideas. The business model.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Up and Running

DECEMBER 5, 2016

Can the Business Model Canvas replace the business plan? In 2010, Alex Osterwalder published his book, “Business Model Generation,” wherein he created a framework for what Tim Berry calls “business identity.” Osterwalder defined a template called Business Model Canvas for documenting business models.

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Lean Silicon Valley Business Model Forecast 60