SoCal CTO

MARCH 5, 2007

There are quite a few other Software Development Companies in Southern California working on open source and/or freemium business models. Common revenue streams are consulting, training, support, customization, upgraded versions for corporate applications, etc. Attorney and Startup Business Advisor – Aaron Shec.

Open Source 150

Open Source Business Model Technical Cofounder Southern California 150

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 30, 2020

I suggest looking for painful problems to solve, rather than “easier to use” or “nice to have” solutions, for customers with money. Customers line up to believe and buy from people who are viewed as leaders or experts relative to a specific solution. Collaborate with customers to tune your solution.

Merger 386

Merger Acquisition Software Review Social Media 386

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 25, 2021

Today’s customers are overloaded and overwhelmed by too much information, so making a decision is a challenge. You may think this is only important to your marketing and sales people, but in reality it doesn’t matter how great your product or technology might be, you won’t succeed if you don’t understand your target customer decision process.

Customer 340

Customer Sales Business Model Social Media 340

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 17, 2020

The discipline of writing down your plan is the best way to make sure you understand how to transform your idea into a business, and how to communicate it. Offer free solutions to bring in more customers. Don’t get caught in the myth that you shouldn’t worry about monetization until after you have a large customer base.

Intellectual Property 436

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Viral Distribution 436

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? Let the real learning begin. The Nine Teams Present. outside of Stanford.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

VC Cafe

MARCH 1, 2024

AI to build enterprise software – In the future, every enterprise could have their own custom ERP, CRM or HRIS that is continually updating itself as the company itself is changing. What’s missing is the last mile — distribution, customer journey design, guardrails and workflow automation.

Artificial Inteligence 177

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Software Review Generative AI 177

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 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. Dave was building a mobile app for matching college students who needed to move within a local area with potential local movers.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

View from Seed

APRIL 14, 2020

But in a FOMO world, more investors are willing to take a chance on a founder that they don’t know, but seems to match some of the heuristics of other high quality founders. Business Models and Sectors. Also, companies that do find PMF and can attract capital will experience less competition for customers and employees.

Early Stage 374

Early Stage Software Review Technical Review Due Diligence 374

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2014

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. Integration with Customer Development and Lean Startup.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 25, 2011

But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Kristin Zhivago, in her new book “ Roadmap to Revenue ,” makes the point that the selling system is broken, since sellers no longer sell the way customers are buying. The best way to do this is with real customer interviews.

Customer 242

Customer Technical Review Business Model Revenue 242

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 10, 2020

According to most definitions, an entrepreneur is one who envisions a new and different business, meaning one that is not a copy of an existing business model. Even fewer are able to grow the startup into a viable business. At this point investors should be interested in buying a chunk of the business.

Matching 317

Matching Seed Stage Angel Investor Business Model 317

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 27, 2019

My simple answer is that they keep their focus on customers, rather than technology. Jeff Bezos has kept his focus on customers. In my view, every startup in today’s world would do well to adopt a management system with the same key objectives: Start with a customer-obsessed business model.

Global 308

Global Marketing Technical Review Algorithm 308

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 2, 2019

Their assumption is that customers and investors will be wowed by this into buying, ignoring the evidence that large-scale change takes a long time, most often fails, and scares away customers and investors alike. Due to qualms of customers and governments, he sold less than 30,000 of the devices over the next five years.

Technical Review 226

Technical Review Leadership Portfolio Matching 226

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 11, 2020

Investor due diligence on a startup is not a mysterious black art, but is nothing more than a final integrity check on all aspects of your business model, team, product, customers, and plan. Outside of work is where you can best evaluate the chemistry match, and decide whether you can enjoy and learn from the relationship.

Technical Review 310

Technical Review Due Diligence Term Sheet Offshore 310

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2013

First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. Finding a viable business model is not a linear, analytical process that can be guided by a business plan.

Business Model 332

Business Model Technical Review Business Plan Search 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

Most large companies manage three types of innovation: process innovation (making existing products incrementally better), continuous innovation (building on the strength of the company’s current business model but creating new elements) and disruptive innovation (creating products or services that did not exist before.).

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

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. This experience has provided me a whole new set of pattern matching filters as an investor.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

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. No one can truly understand your customers or genuinely share their interests unless she is a customer herself. That’s right.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 16, 2019

Today’s customers are overloaded and overwhelmed by too much information, so making a decision is a challenge. You may think this is only important to your marketing and sales people, but in reality it doesn’t matter how great your product or technology might be, you won’t succeed if you don’t understand your target customer decision process.

Customer 268

Customer Sales Business Model Social Media 268

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 23, 2013

First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. Finding a viable business model is not a linear, analytical process that can be guided by a business plan.

Business Model 224

Business Model Business Plan Technical Review Search 224

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. Get it done, now.

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

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Alexander Osterwalder and I spent last week in Salt Lake City, Utah as judges at the 2 nd Annual International Business Model Competition , hosted by Professor Nathan Furr , and his team at the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known.

Business Model 263

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 263

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. Build, Measure, Learn sounds pretty simple. Waterfall Development.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 8, 2023

A better approach is to first understand who these people are, why and how they invest, and then focus on the ones who are the best match for your particular startup stage, location and industry. Here are eight key insights that will help you find a productive match: Angels want equity ownership, not causes.

Venture Capital 265

Venture Capital Accredited Investor Syndicate Syndication 265

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 14, 2013

But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Kristin Zhivago, in her book “ Roadmap to Revenue ,” makes the point that the selling system is broken, since sellers no longer sell the way customers are buying. The best way to do this is with real customer interviews.

Revenue 263

Revenue Startup Technical Review Business Model 263

VC Cafe

APRIL 4, 2024

Counter position – Kill the value-proposition of the competition with a new, superior business model, which the incumbent does not mimic due to anticipated damage to their existing business. This is the an important part of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers , a solid framework for business strategy.

Generative AI 78

Generative AI Artificial Inteligence Technical Review ChatGPT 78

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 7, 2017

But the reality is that sellers are no longer in charge of the customer buying process. Kristin Zhivago, in her classic book “ Roadmap to Revenue ,” makes the point that the selling system is broken, since sellers no longer sell the way customers are buying. The best way to do this is with real customer interviews.

Small Business 147

Small Business Revenue Technical Review Business Model 147

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

Business Plan Versus Business Models. Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from? A business plan is the execution document that large companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. initial business model hypotheses).

Business Plan 312

Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 312

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.).

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 24, 2021

By removing physical boundaries, the care delivery modality provides an obvious advantage to more efficiently match geographically unbalanced provider supply with patient demand. . Affordability . Patient-facing cost is a key driver of healthcare accessibility. Scalable Go-To-Market . What’s the End Game.

Vertical 156

Vertical Software Review Portfolio Demand 156

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 13, 2018

Searching and Matching. Attract Your Customers. Ask all of your acquaintances and friends to sign up on the site, and, if you have a subscription based business model, then offer discounts for the first 700 members that sign up on your site. Create a Business Model. Communication Platform for Users.

Marketing 100

Marketing Web Development Campaign Audience 100

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 27, 2018

When you’re setting up a brand-new business, a well-designed website is the engine that powers online presence and performance. It can help you capture traffic from key customer demographics, establish a unique personality and build a loyal customer base.

Entrepreneur 100

Entrepreneur Curation Differentiation Web Development 100

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 24, 2017

If you are already running a business in this category, or thinking about one, I recommend a new book, “ The Profitable Professional ,” by Kelly Clifford. Unless you have deep pockets, you won’t survive without an adequate margin, including all the costs of running a business and staying current with technologies and market changes.

Differentiation 141

Differentiation SBA Social Media Dividend 141

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 12, 2017

But while that particular model has seen success, it certainly won’t be the only way that companies will be able to create greater personalization and serendipitous discovery for their customers. It is very difficult to win over customers without matching the jaw-dropping value and service that Amazon has trained consumers to expect.

Internet 209

Internet eCommerce Bankruptcy Technical Review 209