Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2020

The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. Suppliers are going out of business or requiring cash-up-front terms. Revenue models and forecasts are no longer valid. In sum, whatever business model you had at the beginning of the year may be obsolete. Here’s how.

Customer 436

Customer Marketing Customer Development Lean 436

Steve Blank

JUNE 27, 2017

Initially, a startup has no business model and no market share to defend. If they select a business model that targets industry incumbents, they don’t have to worry about upsetting existing customers, partners or distribution channels. Its employees and investors don’t depend on an existing revenue stream.

Startup 275

Startup New York City Valuation Distribution 275

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

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. IPOs dried up.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

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 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. Large companies wrote business plans, so VC’s made startups write business plans.

Business Model 263

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 263

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. Read Business Model Generation pages 1-72, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany Chapter 3. 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. She started by sketching her business model canvas on a napkin, but somehow the conversation quickly shifted to what was really on her mind. ——-. I told Radhika this is a perennial question for startups.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

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

OCTOBER 9, 2018

They use the Business Model (or Mission Model ) Canvas to keep track of their key hypotheses and then rapidly test them by talking to customers and iterating their Minimal Viable Products. This allows them to quickly find product/market fit. Except when they’re in a regulated market. Diagram Your Business Model.

Marketing 321

Marketing Startup Government SEC 321

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

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. I was an aggressive, young and a very tactical VP of marketing at Ardent , a supercomputer company – who really hadn’t a clue about the relationship between profound beliefs, customer discovery and strategy.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

As the farm fields flew by on the interstate I listened as Dave described how he translated his vision into a series of hypotheses and mapped them onto a business model canvas. Speed keeps cash burn rate down while allowing you to converge on a repeatable and scalable business model. Customer Discovery.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

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

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

These misses weren’t in some tangential markets – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading. Execution and Organization of Core Businesses. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. Yet a very smart CEO missed all of these. What’s Missing?

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

These misses weren’t in some tangential markets – missing search, mobile and the cloud were directly where Microsoft users were heading. Execution and Organization of Core Businesses. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. Yet a very smart CEO missed all of these. What’s Missing?

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 14, 2017

Companies with business models built around internal combustion engines disrupted those built around horses. Fourth, large, existing companies are executing a known business model and have built processes, procedures and key performance indicators to measure progress to a known set of goals. They were different.

Valuation 266

Valuation Business Model Software Engineering Engineer 266

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

JANUARY 30, 2013

Doing so meant they would have to take risks for IP acquisition and customer/market risks outside their experience or comfort zone. Therefore a major error in setting up our corporate innovation program was our lack of understanding how disruptive it would be to the current innovation model and to the executives who ran the R&D Labs.

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

Steve Blank

APRIL 8, 2010

They collected information that justified their assumptions about the problem, opportunity, market size, their solution and competitors and the their team, They rolled up a 5-year sales forecast with assumptions about their revenue model, pricing, sales, marketing, customer acquisition cost, etc. It’s static. It’s dynamic. “So

Business Model 328

Business Model Business Plan Customer Cap Table 328

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? Consider if their business worth pursuing? Stay tuned.

Business Model 236

Business Model Nebraska Peru Germany 236

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

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. Startups are in fact only temporary organizations, organized to search –not execute–for a scalable and repeatable business model.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2014

Think about this; 7 years ago Nokia owned 50% of the handset market. Fast-forward to today—Apple is the most profitable Smartphone company in the world and in Spain Android commands a market share of more than 90%. Its worldwide market share of Smartphones has dwindled to 5%. Apple owned 0%.

Private Equity 325

Private Equity Metrics China Intellectual Property 325

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 22, 2011

The 21 NSF teams had been out of the classroom for just 15 hours as they filed back in with their business model canvas presentations. Their assignment appeared (to them) to be deceptively simple: Write down their initial hypotheses for the 9 components of their company’s business model (who are the customers?

Business Model 234

Business Model Intellectual Property Lean Wiki 234

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Luckily Alexander Osterwalder’s business model canvas presents a visual overview of the nine components of a business on one page. activities necessary to implement the business model. cost structure resulting from the business model. activities necessary to implement the business model.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

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

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 Business Model Canvas is a great way to diagram it out.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

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. . ——-. Tech investing is risky. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers? And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web.

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

If they were a commercial company, they figured out product/market fit; or if a government organization, it focused on solution/mission fit. They’ll use government regulation and lawsuits to keep out new entrants with more innovative business models. Over time as these organizations got large, they built process.

Government 315

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 315

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. It’s hard enough to pick which existing companies with known business models to aid. This is the first of two posts about Finland and entrepreneurship.

Finland 324

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 324

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2011

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Market Types. The last time I wrote about Max I said, “I can’t wait to see what Max does by the time he’s 21.&# Turns out his birthday is in a week, September 7th. Happy birthday Max.

Software Review 292

Software Review Early Stage Technical Review Startup 292

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the early 1920s a new dean changed the curriculum – shifting it from an industry orientation (steel, railroads, etc.) – to a functional one (marketing, factory and employment management (HR), etc.). Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). experiential.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

When Sloan arrived at GM in 1920 he realized that the traditional centralized management structures organized by function (sales, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing) were a poor fit for managing GM’s diverse product lines. Modern Corporation Marketing. auto market. car market. General Motors had 20%.

Michigan 268

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 268

Steve Blank

MARCH 17, 2020

But next the question is, ‘What happens to my business?”. The questions every startup or small business CEO needs to ask now are: What’s my Burn Rate and Runway? What does your new business model look like? This math works in a normal market…. Unfortunately, it’s no longer a normal market. Laying off people?

Burn Rate 436

Burn Rate Startup Valuation Sales Cycle 436

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

The startups and the teaching team crafted a challenge for the kids to tackle using the Customer Development methodology, Lean Launchpad tools and the business model canvas. For their first startup, we chose a 3-year old funded company that was working to refine its customer segment and channel for its physical product.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334