Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. He took a deep breath, looked around the boardroom table and then proceeded to outline a radical reconfiguration of the product line (repackaging the products rather than reengineering them) and a change in sales strategy, focusing on a different customer segment.

Business Model 332

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 332

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development?

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2020

The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Suppliers are going out of business or requiring cash-up-front terms. Here’s how.

Customer 436

Customer Marketing Customer Development Lean 436

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

His basic point was: If someone, including me, tells you something isn’t a great idea and there’s no market for it there are only two acceptable responses. I’m going to take that thought out into the field and validate it with my customers." Customer Validation 101. Either: "That’s interesting. billion dollar mistake.

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

I was having coffee with the CEO of a new startup, listening to her puzzle through how to communicate to potential customers. She was an academic on leave from Stanford now selling SAAS software to large companies, but was being inundated with marketing communications advice. “My Define the Mission of Marketing Communications.

Marketing 310

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Business Model Design. Today every business organization from startup to large company uses the words “business model.” More importantly they showed how any company’s business model could be defined in 9 boxes.

Customer Development 329

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 329

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

The class has talked to 1,440 customers to date.). The teams present what they learned talking to 10-15 customer/week, and get comments, suggestions and critiques from their teaching team. We’ve recorded these panels for each part of the business model canvas. Therapeutics customer = pharma and biotech companies.

Lean 258

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 258

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. Customer Discovery. He worked hard to deeply understand the customer problems of these two customer segments.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21 st 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. Problem – Lean Doesn’t Have a Market Definition Step.

Customer 420

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

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 248

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. Get customers to the site. Test the “problem” with customer data. Size the market opportunity.

Lean 333

Lean Web Coder Business Model 333

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

Surprisingly if you’ve filled out the business model canvas you already know who you need. I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. Filed under: Customer Development. Customer Development'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 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. And what the market needed would, of course, be exactly what we had envisioned.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation - how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.). Customer Discovery in the Real World.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model.

Customer Development 328

Customer Development Developer Customer Cofounder 328

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

In my experience, I saw that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. The class was unique in that it was 1) team-based, 2) experiential, 3) lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). Product/Market Fit Versus The Business Model Canvas.

Lean 248

Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 248

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2014

Product/Market fit now has its own book. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses and agile engineering to build minimum viable products. Teaches you how to use Customer Development to test it.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

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.) Many of them had heard the phrase “product/market fit” before, but now they were living it. The news from customers was not good.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

But the product/market fit of this first iteration is a swing and a miss. Marketing and capital expenses (new factory, high R&D expense) were predicated on consumer-scale sales. I got a preview of PhotoCD when I was the head of marketing at SuperMac , a supplier of hardware and software for graphics professionals.

Search 256

Search Marketing Forecast Burn Rate 256

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. Few entrepreneurs find this scalable and repeatable business model because it’s not easy. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 ——-.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

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? finding product/market fit).

Customer 413

Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

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

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. And he proceeded to lay out a fairly complex and innovative sales and marketing strategy for our next 18 months.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

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

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. But the purpose of this post is what happens when a founder (or large company CEO) finds a better business model.

Customer 195

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

With hindsight we should have had “proof of concepts” tested in a corporate center (think ‘pop-up incubator’) where they would do extensive Customer Discovery. We should had done this before assigning the teams to a particular business unit (or had the ability to create a new business unit, or spin the team out of the company).

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

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

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Try innovating inside a large company where 99% of the company is executing the current business model, while you’re trying to figure out and build what comes next. Why are some companies able to reinvent themselves while others, once market leaders, are disrupted? So they prepare for future markets by exploring new ventures.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With Customers. The Business Model. An introduction to The Business Model Canvas. How to Get, Keep and Grow Customers ? How to Get Out of the Building and Test the Business Model. What is Customer Development. Customer Validation.

Lean 356

Lean Customer Development Business Model Video 356

Steve Blank

JUNE 28, 2014

If you can’t see the video click here Filed under: 2 Minute Lessons , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. 2 Minute Lessons Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Teaching'

Customer 313

Customer Search Lean Business Model 313

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. Brilliant ad agencies and clever marketing communications experts. Talented product developers. Highly trained salespeople.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features. The New Structure of the Venture Capital industry.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

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