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

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.

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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 271

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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.

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Just as I was getting settled into Zilog, the manager of the training department got fired. (I I was beginning to think that my hiring managers were related to red-shirted guys on Star Trek.) Since the training department was part of sales no one really paid attention to the four of us. VP of Sales? Life was good.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one. Reply Fred H Schlegel , on October 20, 2009 at 1:20 pm Said: I believe the MBA was originally developed with the idea of helping functional experts move more smoothly into upper management ranks.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

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 196

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. They communicated this to product management who looked at all of the internal requirements we had generated (e.g. some came from our customer service, some were to improve performance / scalability from tech ops, some were bug fixes, etc.)

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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. I was met by a very apologetic manager who said, “We’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last week. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired.

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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.” I’ll add I’m particularly curious about how founders recognize that point at which they need to exit / fire the old customers.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile. Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) * Archives + October 2009 +… (Read more)+ Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. Then it hit me – no one else wanted to be manager – what was the worst that could happen? All I had to do was ask. For entrepreneurs good things come to those who ask.

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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. We were constantly creating metrics [.] there were words of encouragement on the package.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. Prior to his investing and advisory career, Evangelos spent 20+ years in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering. Filed under: Customer Development. He was the CEO of two startups.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. What happened?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. 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

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Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

And there are more to come: your first job, getting married, buying a house, having a child, becoming a manager, starting a company, retirement – and eventually commencement speaker. 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.

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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.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. All we had to do was tell customers they could get video into their computer – and not promise anything else. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. But you probably never heard of ReelTime.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. emotional rather than technical) and a lot harder to manage than a startup. Two of my role models for my career were in this company. (And

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. If the management team is thinking they’ve made it, the new building is just symptomatic of a company heading for a crash. That’s when things went south. A VERY nice office.

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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

JUNE 4, 2012

As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C. Using the Lean LaunchPad (the business model canvas and Customer Development) are the right tools. They accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8

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Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 305

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. None of mine did.)

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

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. As one could imagine this was the last thing the supercomputer center management wanted to hear. It was for sale on Ebay. I liked to fail fast, move on, and not look back. I bought the Cray.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. Sloan realized that the traditional centralized management structures (like General Motors had in 1920) were poor fits for the management of GM’s already diverse product lines.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

Do you know of any similar studies showing correlation between sales success and founder success? The three dropouts above were each, in their own way, some pretty slick sales guys. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] When recruiting was hard the functional managers started looking at 2.8-9s.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. We only have 20 customers, and Large Company x has millions.” This is easy to test.

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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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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die. It may not be for you.

Silicon Valley 170

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.&# (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Ownership and Teamwork not turf.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.) Customer Development.) And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name.

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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. But we managed to grow a few customers, so that’s good, in spite of the name. Noel: So we been looking on enterprise power management tool.

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