Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

We were sitting in our conference room in our first “system-planning meeting” trying to define the specifications of our new supercomputer and make the trade-offs between what was possible to build, and what customers in this new market would actually want and need. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 271

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Your results may vary.

Venture Capital 209

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

At first only the national laboratories and the largest companies could afford to buy supercomputers, (the Cray-1 cost ~$9 million) but over time scientists and researchers were also starting to use them. I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications.

Silicon Valley 147

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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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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR.

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. I remember thinking, “What a disappointment one of the smartest engineers I know and he is going to waste his time making games.”

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. It will cost you your job.” Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 259

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

Silicon Valley 171

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office. Stay hungry, stay lean.

Silicon Valley 205

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost. So we’ve learned to live with our customers. We’re now piloting our application with Tree Farmers in California and working with crop specialists at U.C. Customer Development Teaching Technology'

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

Silicon Valley 184

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Some are r esegmenting an existing market– directed at a niche that an incumbent isn’t satisfying (like Dell and Compaq when they were startups) or providing a low cost alternative to an existing supplier (like Southwest Airlines when it first started.)

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The discoveries in tube and circuit research suggested new electronic intelligence and countermeasure techniques and systems; in turn the needs of the Applied Lab pushed tube and circuit development. The future of the valley was clear – microwaves.

Silicon Valley 142

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? The obvious one’s were who were they?

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2012

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made ~ 2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. And to help teach these many teams, the NSF will recruit other universities that have engineering entrepreneurship programs to become part of the Innovation Corps network. Textbook is here.

America 241

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

In addition he conducts research with Dr. Hsueh Chia Chang in Chemical Engineering. from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering. For his doctoral work, his research focused on liver tissue engineering and stem cell differentiation. in Structural Engineering from Stanford University in 2006.

Cofounder 190

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

In addition he conducts research with Dr. Hsueh Chia Chang in Chemical Engineering. from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering. For his doctoral work, his research focused on liver tissue engineering and stem cell differentiation. in Structural Engineering from Stanford University in 2006.

Cofounder 120

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Reply steveblank , on September 16, 2009 at 7:00 pm said: Greg, The Google Group “Lean Startup Circle&# at [link] is a wonderful repository of Customer Development/Lean Startup success and failure. It’s more reference material. Thus, these pages. I’ll add more as time goes on.

Software Review 110

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

October 2012 – Erin Turner and Gagan Biyani host the first Growth Hackers Conference in Menlo Park, California. June 2014 – Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown write Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today’s Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth , which defines growth strategies as growth engines.

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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 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 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.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that. However, for the Web 2.0

Vertical 128

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

Davis , a German applied Laser research group, a California organic farm er who wanted to be an Earlyvangelist , four service partners and three weed/pest management consultants. Answer: The most cost effective wavelength is 800-900nm ~ $20/watt. Final question: Is the improved absorption efficiency worth the extra cost?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Communication between scientists, engineers and corporations were relatively open, and ideas flowed freely. At Stanford, Dean of Engineering 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.

Silicon Valley 159

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Now we were faced with the fact that even though we were gaining market share daily, there was nothing coming out of Engineering. Instead of eight boards, Engineering was going to be able to deliver one new graphics board. Now we could give customers lower price boards without Engineering spending 12 months to design new ones.)

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Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 134

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget. Then shout the messages out (virtually) at the top of your lungs.

Silicon Valley 178

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

That is just currently a full personal money sucking process, as you're taxed on income and have no business breaks yet, besides supplies, the majority of costs to start up a business have no tax advantages to creating a start up. Truth be told, we've got defense contractors here just like California does too.

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role.

Silicon Valley 126

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usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

The answer to this question must be: I have enough design, engineering, QA, and customer support resources to dedicate to supporting and improving this feature without causing me to neglect any of the other important features that I’m already supporting. My God, How Long Will This Take?

Software Review 40

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Firebase : Are all your developers front-end engineers? Google Custom Search Engine. Google App Engine. Search Engine Optimization Tools. tells you how much adwords cost. usability testing for designers and developers. Codeacademy.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups make the same point. However, I think if I had understood the basics of Customer Development I might have done 5-6 startups rather than 8 to get to retirement.

Entrepreneur 331

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Who better to answer than the company's engineering lead. The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. New York, California different toilet, same s#@t. call to arms.

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