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. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 139

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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

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 220

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.

North Carolina 126

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000. So our people in the field could correct any egregious design advice I gave to customers who mattered. VP of Sales? Life was good.

Silicon Valley 181

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Get Out of the Building As I got up to leave the room, the CEO said, “I want you out of the building talking to customers; find out who they are, how they work, and what we need to do to sell them lots of these new computers.” Sale Guys, Account Reps, Project Manager – they all need to be able to deal with this without even blinking.

Silicon Valley 275

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

We hired a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Duke who had worked on helicopter design. In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. At the time this was a pretty controversial decision.

Engineer 205

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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.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

Entrepreneur 167

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features. Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. Back then it seemed foreign.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. steve Customer Development is Hard. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. It starts at ~40:30 in the video.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 142

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Because of the vagaries of how floating point units in computers were designed, your average IBM mainframe of the day would take forever to run a simulation application. Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile. What Markets?

Silicon Valley 151

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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. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 263

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. We talked about some simple design rules and I remember him thanking me for coming, saying we were the only chip company who cared enough to call on him (little did he know.) I thought nothing about the meeting until years later. What happened?

Silicon Valley 133

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Driving across the U.S.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I lived through the time when working in my first job in Ann Arbor Michigan we had to get out a map to find out that San Jose was not only in Puerto Rico but there was a city with that same name in California. The response was inevitably “great pipeline.” (Great pipeline means no real sales.). We now understand that’s wrong.

Restful 227

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. However, if the founder is still running the company, the last thing he wants is a company complacent with day-to-day execution.

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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.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Blog at WordPress.com.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

We knew from back-of-the-envelope calculations that I would need 3 times the combined marketing and sales budgets of the incumbents for a head-on assault. (I The 3:1 Lanchester Laws said I would need $60M in marketing and sales spending to win. If we tried to match them on their playing field we’d never catch up.

Silicon Valley 144

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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. Good stuff too.

Silicon Valley 232

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

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. We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. We knew something our CEO didn’t. But you probably never heard of ReelTime.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show. This is worthy of an open and honest discussion with sales up front. And inviting to the booth/dinner/private demo.

Silicon Valley 129

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

I wanted to understand how customers bought our products. I knew we were selling through a multi-level indirect sales channel. That’s a mouthful to say that our sales people didn’t sell our products directly to a customer. Market messages to indirect sales channels are just like that.

Silicon Valley 192

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Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

When I retired after 21 years working in 8 startups, I was invited to be a guest lecturer at the business school at the University of California Berkeley. The Lean LaunchPad class is now taught around the world – and VC’s expect entrepreneurs to talk about not just their technology but their customer development findings.

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Out of the Ashes A few of the key tenets of Customer Development , came from the ashes. The Customer Discovery lessons of “get outside the building and test your hypothesis with customers,&# and “the founders need to hear the results,&# came from this debacle. We all know how that ends up.

Silicon Valley 122

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. The IPO Bubble – August 1995 – March 2000 In August 1995 Netscape went public, and the world of start ups turned upside down. On its first day of trading, Netscape stock closed at $58/share, valuing the company at $2.7

Silicon Valley 223

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. We were constantly creating metrics [.]

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. Designing the Perfect Building Once the commitment to fix everything wrong was in place, we were off and running on the design phase. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. That’s when things went south.

Silicon Valley 212

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

His marketing and sales instincts and skills seemed magical and he built the company into a $400 million OEM supplier, ultimately selling the company to Unisys. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder?

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

However, in catching up with the VP of Sales of Ardent last night, I was reminded one of the few times I did return for closure. Nuclear Weapons Laboratories used supercomputers to run their hydrodynamics codes for nuclear weapon design and the National Security Agency used them to decrypt codes. It was for sale on Ebay.

Silicon Valley 191

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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 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. Before you go to a trade show sales and marketing need to agree to measurable goals. Then offer those budget dollars to the VP of Sales.

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