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. Perhaps you can determine whether a product is new by asking customers to name the competition.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.” Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.]

Silicon Valley 147

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Any customer who used the four critical color publishing applications was going to be blown away by how much better the SuperMac boards were. Tell Me How to Find You But having benchmarks in hand that showed us as the winner did us no good unless all our potential customers could see them. I’ll email a brief review of it.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. His wife, about my age, could have been a poster child for the stereotypical California hippie surfer, with politics that matched her style – antiwar, anti government, antiestablishment.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Crammed into Silicon Valley along with millions of people around the San Francisco Bay it’s hard to fathom that 15 air miles away was a stretch of California coast that was still rural. How did I miss that?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.

Silicon Valley 217

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2011

And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about who I worked for (and the names of agencies.). Second, to share how my how my thinking about entrepreneurship as a distinct practice and how Customer Development as one of its central components has evolved over the last decade. Now Hear This.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley California Vertical Customer Development 195

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

You may know it by its final name. Filed under: Customer Development , Marketing , SuperMac , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , SuperMac « Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions Gravity Will be Turned Off » 17 Responses EricS , on May 11, 2009 at 11:05 am Said: I loved my Spigot.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.

Silicon Valley 259

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Silence.

Silicon Valley 185

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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. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard.

Silicon Valley 171

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Poplytics – online surveys and analytics AskYourTargetMarket – market research surveys SurveyMonkey - granddaddy of on-line surveys Amazon Mechanical Turk – you can set up a question and get answers PickFu – A/B testing $5 for 50 opinions Collaboration Dropbox – store, sync, and, share files online.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And 30 years later I was teaching in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him. My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. Spooky Music Reading about Terman was like finding the missing link in my career. Play spooky music here.

Silicon Valley 180

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. I see the name of Noel’s company. Why don’t you give Jason the name of your company or your URL? Noel: Am I live? Jason: There you go.

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

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

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? Durant Versus Sloan – Part 1 « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1 – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

Silicon Valley 156

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

This was about the time Christies and Sotheby’s were starting to auction Soviet space program artifacts , and I was thinking that perhaps a spacesuit in the lobby would be appropriate given our name.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Do you know the archetype of their customers? An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” This is easy to test.

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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

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. Customer Development.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand. They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America?

Silicon Valley 247

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Did the company send out direct mail (email or postcards) to potential or pre-registered attendees reminding them to stop by the booth? Has the company talked to key industry analysts/press pre-show to ask them to stop by? Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

Silicon Valley 178

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not just my students) is that Customer Development means getting out of the building and sharing what you are working on. I just found out that someone stole my idea today and also is using my name with “The&# in front of it. Once it almost mattered.

Silicon Valley 149

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. He replied, ‘They were found in the ‘name of system I should have absolutely no knowledge or access to’ manuals. As a going away gift my roommates got me a joke disguise kit with a fake nose, glasses and mustache. he asked me.

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

My partner had convinced several major Hollywood names that this was the inevitable consequence of the merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Don’t confuse your passion for your tools with why your customers will buy your product. We believed that by putting full motion video (i.e. And at the time it was a plausible scenario.)

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

How delightful it would be to have a presidential candidate named Frost. Groovelily Reply jorge , on November 28, 2009 at 12:15 pm Said: I made a similar decision when I left a defense contractor to “go to California&# and work at startups nearly 20 years ago. One must know one’s self and one must know the future.

Silicon Valley 121

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Gust

AUGUST 8, 2012

That’s two free drinks on this particular one-way trip from New York to California, a $10 value (although not worth suing over ). Here’s where it really gets good: Of course I remember my own email and snail mail addresses, but my credit card is stowed along with my briefcase in the overhead compartment.

Customer 143

Customer Southern California San Jose Marketing 143

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. If you drop the sentimentality, a company is a merely a brand-name for a historical context. And brand-names are ultimately are just commodities that can be bought and sold (e.g., Agilent is a $5.8 billion dollar test and measurement company.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Whether you’re wondering what site search you should use or what is the best email marketing tool, knowledge is power. Email Integration. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Email marketing. Add a class name to buttons, forms, quotes, etc. Sendgrid : Need to send email out to users?

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Reply Greg Moreno , on August 7, 2009 at 8:26 pm Said: I came here looking for tips, ideas, and inspirations for entrepreneurs but now I am more interested in your war and spy stories Reply YA , on September 8, 2009 at 5:49 pm Said: Steve: you may wish to know that PVO Strany is not an official name, it is a journalistic term.

Silicon Valley 153

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. In an existing or resegmented market, this may include branding and product line extensions. In most markets, “first mover advantage&# is illusorily; fast followers often win.

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