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

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. to get hard-earned information.

Lean 304

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 304

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2015

Starting this Monday, March 9 th 4-6pm Pacific Time I’ll be on the radio hosting the Bay Area Ventures program on Sirius XM radio Channel 111 – the Wharton Business Radio Channel. Alex Osterwalder – Business Models. Mark your calendar for 4-6pm Pacific Time on Sirius XM Radio Channel 111 : March 9 th.

Channel 120

Channel Venture Capital Lean Business Model 120

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S.

Lean 436

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Steve Blank

JULY 14, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Alexander Osterwalder – inventor of the Business Model Canvas. Why Understand Customers? “We You don’t want to work for just any kind of customers, but customers that have a budget, that are willing to buy from you.

Channel 120

Channel Business Model Cofounder Business Plan 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

To be honest I built the class out of frustration watching schools teach aspiring entrepreneurs that all they need to know is how to write a business plan or how to sit in an incubator building a product. using the business model canvas as the framework. in order to validate/invalidate their business model hypotheses.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

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. Test channel and demand creation activities in the U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 14, 2014

A pivot can change any of nine different things in your business model. A pivot may mean you changed your customer segment, your channel, revenue model/pricing, resources, activities, costs, partners, customer acquisition – lots of other things than just the product. A Pivot is not just changing the product.

Business Model 332

Business Model Lean Customer Development Channel 332

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. 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. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

Silicon Valley 253

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? Don’t Throw the Tomatoes.

Search 324

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 324

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The idea of a Business Model competition first emerged when I realized that Business Plan writing ought to be taught in English Departments – as they’re the best example of creative writing entrepreneurs will ever do. The Business Plan ?- And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination.

Business Model 267

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 267

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Kathy Sierra at Business of Software 2009 - Business of Software Blog , May 4, 2010 "In the old days, getting customers was easy. Putting customers first. Legendary customer support. For a micro-ISV, selling to big businesses can be more lucrative than selling to consumers. You could just outspend.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

In an existing company with existing customers you 1) understand the customers problem and 2) since you do, you can specify the entire feature set on day one. But startups aren’t large companies, but for decades VC’s insisted that startups organize and plan like they were. The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption.

Burn Rate 251

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 251

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

(Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.) There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) Their objective is to get users, orders, customers, etc.

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2014

Students need to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week. The next week they came back in class and presented this : Each week we’d teach them about one more part of what makes up a business model. Like all great Silicon Valley companies they started with a technology and guessed who the customers will be.

Lean 278

Lean Silicon Valley Customer Development Incubator 278

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 9, 2012

In fact, you could say that all that remains from my last book are the four steps of Customer Development. Integrates Alexander Osterwalders “Business Model Canvas” as the front-end and “scorecard” for the customer discovery process. Briefly, the new book.

Entrepreneur 295

Entrepreneur Lean Business Model Customer Development 295

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2010

One of the toughest problems for entrepreneurs is to keep score as they search for their business model. One of the key concepts of Customer Development is writing down your initial hypotheses (guesses) of all the parts of your business model, then updating them with the facts you find outside the building. Keeping Score.

Customer Development 225

Customer Development Business Model Early Stage Channel 225

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. If we’re smart we’ll cross-sell them one of our other products.

Video 184

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 184

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Our LivePlan customers are entrepreneurs, our founder and staff have run and sold companies, the Bplans readers are aspiring entrepreneurs (or actual entrepreneurs), and as I sell my own handmade jewelry, I like to think I have a very small claim to the title. Your customer. Your business model (or how you will make money).

Curation 60

Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. Startups are in fact only temporary organizations, organized to search –not execute–for a scalable and repeatable business model. The EngineKites customer discovery narrative blog is here.

Lean 261

Lean Business Model Agile United States 261

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

Students formed 5-person teams, came up with a business idea then got out of the building to validate their business model. Our goal was not to teach the students to write a business plan nor were we trying to teach them how to give a pitch to VC’s. A Startup is a Search For A Business Model. Customer Discovery.

Intellectual Property 257

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 257

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 28, 2010

In a startup the search for a business model is chaotic, unpredictable and uncertain. Yet the Customer Development process uses a series of checklists to ensure that you walk through the Customer Discovery and Validation steps. Customer Hypothesis Checklist. A Checklist for Chaos. Don’t Treat Them Like Mushrooms.

Business Model 242

Business Model Customer Development Engineer Vesting 242

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

Think of a business model as a drawing that shows all the flows between the different parts of your company. A business model diagram also shows how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. What’s the distribution channel. Business Plan Versus Business Model.

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. Every large company, whether it can articulate it or not, is executing a proven business model (s).

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

That means in their core business, large companies have a series of knowns. They’ve found product/market fit (what products customers want to buy). They’ve learned the best distribution channel to get the product from their company to the customer. for new product development that emphasize immediate returns.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I hate business plan competitions. I Love Business Plan Competitions I had a breakfast with a friend who has founded a few companies in Thailand and started the New Ventures Program at one of their universities. For all the reasons why business plan competitions are wonderful for students from outside the U.S.,

Business Plan 156

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 156

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? what distribution channel? what’s the product?

Business Model 238

Business Model Nebraska Peru Germany 238

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.

Vertical 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom and test the first key hypotheses of their business model: The Value Proposition. To get customer feedback the team posted its first energy survey here and received 27 responses.

Cloud 237

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 237

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2016

Instead, he yearned to channel his creative energies. I went out and talked to customers, friends. The customer feedback he received led him to a market he hadn’t considered: I learned SneakGuard was a good product for cannabis, because once you take the air out of the container, it’ll make it the cannabis last longer. .

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Fort Worth America Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

How startup ideas are developed and nurtured was the focus of conversations with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. The last thing that I built was a contact manager, the ability to track all the information about my prospects, about my customers, so that I could remember them.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Channel Programming Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

The show airs on SiriusXM Channel 111 (weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). You’re constantly critically analyze the gaps in someone’s business plan. We started by doing customer discovery – talking to 75 people in the oil industry over the first four months which was extremely helpful.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

The show airs on SiriusXM Channel 111 (weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). You’re constantly critically analyze the gaps in someone’s business plan. We started by doing customer discovery – talking to 75 people in the oil industry over the first four months which was extremely helpful.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

Last week the teams tested their Revenue Models hypotheses: what are customers willing to pay for? Partners are the external companies whose product or service combines with your Value Proposition to create a complete customer solution or “whole product&# to satisfy customers. The Nine Teams Present.

South Dakota 232

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 232

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

With an out-of-this-world business plan. When it was spun out as a a separate company, Iridium’s 1990 business plan had assumptions about potential customers, their problems and the product needed to solve that problem. A Business Plan Frozen in Time. It is death in a rapidly changing business.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335