Mucker Lab

OCTOBER 12, 2016

Vertical integration of different funding risks. I also believe that the ebb and flow of the venture investment cycle has been exacerbated by the recent vertical integration of early, growth, and even late stage venture funds. The average (or even above average) horse never wins. The road ahead for entrepreneurs.

Harvest 60

Harvest Vertical IPO Early Stage 60

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. I remember presenting our ideas for Marketing Automation to one VP of Marketing in a large Silicon Valley company. He was now CEO of a new company in our market.

Silicon Valley 232

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. By now the company may have found and settled on a repeatable business model.

Cofounder 223

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 223

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 201

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

To do this they have to accomplish five things; 1) get deal flow – via networking and legwork, they identify likely industries, companies and teams with the potential for rapid growth (less than 10 years), 2) evaluate those companies and teams on the basis of technology, market opportunity, and team.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

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. what Market Type is your startup? Making sales calls with him taught me what a world class salesperson was like.

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 5, 2013

Automation will allow your business to run more efficiently, and will streamline your management overhead. Raise the marketing bar. Today, marketing is all about immediacy. Give your business an instant presence through online networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Keep you office running lean and mean.

Entrepreneur 234

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Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 6, 2012

Automation will allow your business to run more efficiently, and will streamline your management overhead. Raise the marketing bar. Today, marketing is all about immediacy. Give your business an instant presence through online networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Keep you office running lean and mean.

Startup 236

Startup Vertical Reputation Valuation 236

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This week they were testing one of the most confusing sections of a company’s business model – Customer Relationships - the activities used to “Get, Keep and Grow” customers in a physical or virtual (web or mobile) channel.

Customer 252

Customer Cloud EC2 Channel 252

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 28, 2011

Automation will allow your business to run more efficiently, and will streamline your management overhead. Raise the marketing bar. Today, marketing is all about immediacy. Give your business an instant presence through online networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Keep you office running lean and mean.

Startup 230

Startup Vertical Reputation Valuation 230

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Maybe It’s Me When I got to the SuperMac, our Marketing Communications group told me about our “award-winning&# retail packaging for our graphics boards. Her packaging class was so good that we sent every new marketer at SuperMac to take it. Yet when I saw our retail package, I was confused. Worry about the sales results.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. No building, no money, no customers, no market? These customer and market risks need to be translated into facts as soon as possible. Is there an existing market or not?

Silicon Valley 219

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 219

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 421

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 421

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs. The time to product and scale of investment is radically different than other startup markets.&# Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules.

Vertical 151

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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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 246

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Rule 4 : You may want to think twice positioning as a New Market.

Silicon Valley 188

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Is there a profitable business model? The Traditional VC Pitch Entrepreneurs who pursue the traditional product development model don’t have customer data to answer these questions. Can it scale?”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Was Ardent’s business model flawed from the start for being so short on potential customers with deep pockets? I liked to fail fast, move on, and not [.] [.] Reply Yuri Ammosov , on November 22, 2009 at 1:29 pm Said: So, Steve, is there any lesson to be learnt? Was it your error or cruel fate?

Silicon Valley 191

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 191

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

For the first 25 years HP’s business model was static. Of course HP did ship new products and innovate, but their center of innovation was sustaining innovation , around the core of their existing business. However, no markets last forever. Clayton Christensen describes this brilliantly in the Innovators Dilemma.)

Silicon Valley 169

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Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

TripAdvisor may be one of the most fascinating companies I know and so I was excited to dig into their business model as part of my series on scaling. TripAdvisor is more of a classic consumer Internet success story, but with even more powerful network effects and an amazing business model. Really hard. Magical, really.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. 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. “Are you out of your !? *x!

Customer Development 280

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

As Peter began to speak extemporaneously our mouths slowly fell open as he described the video game market, its size, its demographics, the state of the technology, and the state of games. He took us through a day (and a night) of a hardcore gamer and told us about the new class of CD-ROM based game machines about to hit the market.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

In liquid markets, most of the calories expended on technology and analytics are focused on trade selection, or “ origination ”. I use another live Google doc to maintain my database of companies I’m marketing to other VCs. 2) Market . Many tools designed for B2B marketing in general are also relevant to investors.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Which at this stage of the company was marketing and financing. Our “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” story played great in Silicon Valley, they ate it up in Hollywood, and the business press tripped over themselves to talk to us. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to listen to customers. We all know how that ends up.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I hate business plan competitions – when they encourage students to write a “winning plan&# rather than teaching them how to get out of the building and use locally available resources to start a company. as one attempt to clearly define how exactly the company is creating value in the market.

Business Plan 143

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

The dysfunctional family theory may explain why founders who excel in the chaotic early phases of a company throw organizational hand grenades into their own companies after they find a repeatable and scaleable business model and need to switch gears into execution.

Founder 302

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

surrendered market leadership and thought leadership. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. didn’t care/focus enough about discovering how to market eventvue. The market was not there.

Software Review 79

Software Review Startup Technical Review Vesting 79

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets , and with my team of vertical marketers , I thought I had achieved absolution and redemption. But there was one fatal flaw.

Silicon Valley 178

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 178

Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

Startups were not just smaller versions of a large company, they were about invention, innovation and iteration - of business model, product, customers and on and on. At these startups both the problem and solution were unknown. Startups were doing discovery of the problem and solution in real-time.

Silicon Valley 121

Silicon Valley RSS California Chad 121

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

The founding process extremely challenging and when things get hard you need people to lean on both for advice and support! His ability to inspire social change using the power of private markets is impressive, and he has generally targeted areas that need changing. Which living person do you most admire and why? Hard question.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Cofounder New York Software Review 62

Up and Running

OCTOBER 31, 2017

One of my all-time favorite entrepreneurs, and a man who has had such a profound impact on our world, Elon Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur who has created fortunes in a variety of industries and verticals. Some people may not know this, but Amazon actually started as a bookstore, operating on a business model similar to dropshipping.

Entrepreneur 121

Entrepreneur Affiliate Finance United States 121

Hearpreneur

JUNE 26, 2016

Each day some new story comes out about some creative marketing plan that takes the cake and drives huge traffic to a business. If a business is to survive and thrive making an effort to be unique is a must. 1 – Business Model. 1 – Business Model. promo can only be described as unique.

Entrepreneur 92

Entrepreneur Technical Review Harvest Portfolio 92

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

When you are done reading the post, you'll be super mad that your marketing strategy is not more influenced by your competitor's data! Note to NSA reviewer of this blog post: I'm a harmless digital marketer, totally not worth your attention.]. Every website in the world has a unique business strategy.

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