Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

This tendency is a two edged sword: by iterating strategy a startup can dramatically improve the size and trajectory of the company, but at times this process can be the bane of venture investors (and why they have prematurely grey hair.)

Customer 201

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 201

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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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. It was a long way from Ellis Island.)

Silicon Valley 126

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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. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

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. In contrast, customer acquisition, brand, reputation, etc.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. What happened?

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Many thanks, you’ve changed my startup a hundred times already. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. Keep ‘em coming.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup. Lets see why.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture. None of mine did.)

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

For scientific researchers who want to commercialize their technology, doing a startup first pulls them out of their comfort zone. But then the Lean Startup’s scientific method of validating their business idea quickly has them feeling right at home. from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering.

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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.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

But entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making. Achieving consensus about every corner case from each stakeholder in the room is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.)

Silicon Valley 182

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 182

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

For scientific researchers who want to commercialize their technology, doing a startup first pulls them out of their comfort zone. But then the Lean Startup’s scientific method of validating their business idea quickly has them feeling right at home. from University of California, Davis in Biomedical Engineering.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Joseph Campbell’s insight of the repeatable patterns in mythology is equally applicable to building a successful startup. All startups (whether a new division inside a larger corporation or in the canonical garage) follow similar patterns—a series of steps which, when followed, can eliminate a lot of the early wandering in the dark.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

At 19 I thought that I would be able to work really hard on my startup, and then in a year we’d have break out success. How founders cope with startup challenges was the focus of today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. We were depending on investor funding, but with $60,000 in revenue no one would fund it. .

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Historically, these were two guys with high testosterone. They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.) This first Zen moment happened at a SuperMac exec staff meeting.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Last week the teams tested their Revenue Models hypotheses: what are customers willing to pay for? Of real interest was their evolving view of their revenue model. All the teams have crossed the Rubicon. .

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South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 223

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. I have no personal knowledge of computers nor does anyone in our organization have any appreciable knowledge.

Silicon Valley 169

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

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 191

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Reply Mark Essel , on July 2, 2009 at 9:14 am Said: Reality distortion field isn’t the basic technique covered in startups 101? Reply Wyatt ODay , on July 2, 2009 at 8:18 am Said: Great post, Steve. I love all these war stories. We understood none of this. More detail in future posts.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all startups. Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs.

Vertical 151

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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. We would rather chase revenue. Of course you should chase revenue. Especially if you don’t normally listen to podcasts?

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

2010 – Sean Ellis, who currently runs Qualaroo , coins the term “growth hacking” in his article, Find a Growth Hacker for Your Startup. Andrew Chen , Uber : “Startups don’t need growth hackers – at first. Gagan first separates the two by suggesting that startups do growth hacking and bigger companies do marketing.

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Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company. All the strategic thinking in the world won’t make up for a missed revenue plan. If sales revenue and profits are high enough, we could take the company public or sell it, and the stock would be worth more than the paper it was printed on.

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usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

It’s not enough to just launch a feature and see if your revenue increases. You need to have some sort of plan for testing to see how it’s affecting key metrics , whether those are revenue, retention, registration, user happiness, or some other number you care about. How Am I Going to Get Feedback on this Feature?

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Advisory Board 40

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

We did that when we surveyed our customers. And in this very unique case, we figured out how to maximize revenue and profit by branding and product line extensions. Marketings job is to take engineering products and use them to maximize revenue and profit. This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge.

Silicon Valley 136

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 136

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I’ve spent my life in innovation, eight startups in 21 years, and the last 15 years in academia teaching it. 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.

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 227