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.

Customer Development 212

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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.

Silicon Valley 125

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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 267

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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 185

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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 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 194

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? The Modern Corporation Sloan is rightly credited with formalizing the idea of the modern U.S. One guy really did all of this. Who was he?

Silicon Valley 170

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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.

Silicon Valley 197

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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 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

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.

Silicon Valley 177

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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.

Silicon Valley 191

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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 262

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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 267

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 267

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 159

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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.)

Silicon Valley 148

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

political leadership with a much bigger picture. They developed the National Intelligence Estimate – a series of reports which summarized their judgment about the size of the Russian threat. If you want to refer to PVO by name, call it just PVO (acronym for “Air Defense&# in Russian). Reply Nelson A.

Silicon Valley 165

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

Silicon Valley 194

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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.

Silicon Valley 201

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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?

Silicon Valley 190

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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 201

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. You never heard of them because their work was secret.

Silicon Valley 290

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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 276

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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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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 133

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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.

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 140

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies, Intel and Digital Equipment, names that at that time carried a lot of weight. Your response and version #3 begs another question, namely: was everyone treated this way or just you? Customer development isn’t just for [.]

Silicon Valley 281

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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 158

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SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

recently did a lecture at a Babson MBA summer class on Entrepreneurial Leadership. California Milk Processor Board) – 1993. The Phantom Sales Forecast – Failing at Customer Validation - Steve Blank , July 22, 2010 Startup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch.

Software Review 217

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

My name is Crystal Williams, and I maintain a small business blog called Babeofbusiness.com. 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. Thus, these pages.

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