Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. What kind of objectives would a startup want or need for sales and marketing?

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 220

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

This integral element of most businesses is woven through every aspect of operations. From manufacturing to sales to finance, the supply chain routinely fails to command the respect it deserve. For most companies to succeed, the goal is to deliver a quality product at a reasonable profit. Manage and Mitigate Supply Chain Risk.

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Management Forecast Los Angeles San Francisco 145

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Value Proposition (their company’s product or service.) 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 Nine Teams Present.

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Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 236

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Entrepreneurs put together their funding presentation by extracting the key ideas from their business plan, putting them on PowerPoint/Keynote and pitching the company – until they get funded or exhausted.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. For a micro-ISV, selling to big businesses can be more lucrative than selling to consumers. Instead of making a few dollars per sale and hoping for thousands of sales, you sell to only a few customers, and charge much higher rates. Here’s why.

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Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Up and Running

MAY 18, 2016

This book will teach you how to test your vision continuously, and adapt and adjust your plans so that you don’t become part of the business failure statistics. This is the planning methodology of choice for startups worldwide.” ” Lean Business Planning: Get What You Want From Your Business.

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Startup Venture Capital Angel Investor Lean 80

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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.

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Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 322

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2014

0:43: Business Plans versus Business Models. 1:46: The Differences: Accounting, Engineering & Sales. 6:07: Engineering: Waterfall Development in a Large Company vs. Minimum Viable Product in a Startup. 1:28: Using the Business Model Canvas. 1:49: Use Customer Development to Test Your Hypotheses.

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Founder Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 328

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. ———– Whether your venture is a new pizza parlor or the hottest new software product, beware: These nine flawed assumptions are toxic.

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Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

For example, one of the critical business model hypotheses they could test locally is Product/Market fit – the connection between their Value Proposition (what product or service they were building) and the Customer Segment (who they were building it for.). while building their products in China. sales office.

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Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

But startups aren’t large companies, but for decades VC’s insisted that startups organize and plan like they were. In fact, for decades if you drew this diagram on day one of a startup VC’s would nod sagely and everyone would get to work heading to first customer ship. The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 248

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.

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Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 264

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. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious.

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 232

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. I walked into the VP of Sales’ office and with my knees trembling, I politely asked for the job. I had been teaching Z8000 design to customers for the last year and a half.

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Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But here was a $499 product that could let everyone use video.) Even though we won’t make a ton of money, it will be an ambassador for the rest of our product family. People who aren’t current customers of our graphics boards will get to know our company and brand. If we’re smart we’ll cross-sell them one of our other products.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 168

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Do your research and validate your idea: You’re probably going to be doing this at the same time as you write your business plan. It’s the lean format of the business plan—the format that will allow you to adapt fastest as you progress through the startup phase. Your solution to the problem (your product or service).

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Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

Yet everyone – investors, entrepreneurs, academics — expected new startups to follow the same practices that worked for large companies – write a business plan, forecast 5-year sales projections and build the product without ever talking to customers. The National Science Foundation adopted it.

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Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 222

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).

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IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

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. Do you think they can handle the truth ?”

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Business Model Customer Development Engineer Vesting 240

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2012

In turn, these new strategies drove the need for companies to be structured around functions (manufacturing, purchasing, sales, etc.). In addition, firms found themselves now managing diverse product lines. In the 1920’s companies restructured from monolithic functional organizations (sales, marketing, manufacturing, purchasing, etc.)

Business Model 333

Business Model Customer Development United States Operations 333

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

This is a 3-day program for entrepreneurship faculty from around the world how to teach entrepreneurship via the Lean LaunchPad approach ( business model canvas + customer development ) and bring their entrepreneurship curriculums into the 21st century. Small businesses make up 99.7% We think we got it figured out.

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Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 307

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. How do we price and position the product? What’s the distribution channel.

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Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Many entrepreneurship courses focus on teaching students “how to write a business plan.” Others emphasize how to build a product. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc.

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. It had taken the company almost twice as long as planned to get their product out the door. All discussion focused on “missing the revenue plan.”.

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Revenue Balance Sheet Hockey Stick Burn Rate 231

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And when we do make bets, they’re small bets on incremental products or acquisitions that simply add to the bottom line.”. I suggested the best place to start the conversation is with the 21 st century definition of a startup: A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

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. Value Proposition is a ten-dollar phrase describing a company’s product or service. Veritas D.C.

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Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 232

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. and the product/service in more detail.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 1, 2010

Trading emails with a startup CEO building an iPhone app, I asked him why potential customers would buy his product. Most competitive analyses are: 1) sales documents for investors and/or 2) an attempt to rationalize the founders assumptions. It’s Part of the Plan. In response he sent me a competitive analysis.

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Customer Development Metrics Differentiation Engineer 260

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.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 19, 2009 Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a response) Inc Magazine has a great new piece up about the increasing use of the Minimum Viable Product by businesses (and not just startups). Like many companies, TPGTEX rolls out new products several times a year.

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San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

At Stanford, Dean of Engineering/Provost Fred Terman wanted companies outside of the university to take Stanford’s prototype microwave tubes and electronic intelligence systems and build production volumes for the military. So the engineers taught themselves how to become marketers, sales people and CEO’s.

Engineer 307

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 307

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’s the product? what distribution channel?

Business Model 237

Business Model Nebraska Peru Germany 237

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2016

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. Until I got the machine to work, I hadn’t even thought about the business plan.

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Entrepreneur Fort Worth America Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

Pat was named one of the “80 Most Influential People in Sales and Marketing History” and was twice named Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” for both ACT! Being in sales, it struck me that, here I was selling computers but couldn’t find a really good reason to actually use one. … contact software he created in 1985.

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Entrepreneur Channel Programming Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Think, for example, about the way we talk about sales and customer development and the idea of ‘getting out of the building.’ Impatient investors and team members give little support to a founder trying to do Customer Development to verify or modify that idea. They often look on this as a waste of time.

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Silicon Valley Lean Puerto Rico Japan 168