Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 217

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I have been working on getting a startup to revenue for a while, and while this is my 4th iteration and I have not yet succeeded, I’ve been learning new things every time. 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.

Silicon Valley 125

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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 122

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 259

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ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 27, 2011

It is also an excellent platform to address the questions from prospects and help clarify issues and objections for any sales process, which is one of the primary ways Voluble is seeing some of its major early customers using it. The next event will be on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, at 8:00 AM (PDT), register to attend here. MapWide.com.

Entrepreneur 116

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ReadWriteStart

JUNE 23, 2011

MyTab Next, Heddi Cundle from San Francisco, California, discussed MyTab , an online gift-registry of sorts to raise money for travel. The idea is interesting, but needs positioning and validation with the right set of target customers. I advised Anupam to come up with a 2011 strategy. He currently has a 1999 strategy.

Spain 115

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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. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. What happened?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers.

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Duct Tape Marketing

MAY 17, 2023

By cultivating genuine care for their customers, asking impactful questions, and showing empathy, they are able to establish meaningful connections with them. They're both longtime sales leaders, practitioners and professors of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business.

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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. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures.

Customer Development 196

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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. But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building? How many are there? Can it scale?”

Customer Development 262

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ReadWriteStart

MAY 12, 2011

She has, thus far, not done any other formal customer acquisition initiative. In February, he had about 200 customers. Today, he has over a thousand, and he has chosen to focus on the realtor vertical. Happy Grasshopper has incredible testimonials and a host of satisfied customers who are now helping build word of mouth buzz.

San Francisco 125

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.) They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.

Silicon Valley 176

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ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 16, 2010

The trends include Cloud computing, outsourcing, social Web, vertical and local Web, smartphones and tablets, online advertising, online video, online gaming, e-books, and bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Bhupendra has built a product and has started engaging a few customers. You can find details in the blog post on [link].

Senegal 117

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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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them. Lets see why.

Lean 244

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery. It’s a process that doesn’t exist in large companies with existing customers and markets. The “Customer Development” model is a paradox because it is followed by successful startups, yet articulated by no one.

Silicon Valley 127

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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. I replied: “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected. Anybody else got some other ideas?&#

Silicon Valley 120

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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. At first glance, the diagram, which illustrates the process of getting a new product into the hands of waiting customers, appears helpful and benign.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

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 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Intellectual Property At the next class I said, “You all ought to get out and start talking to customers on day one, and get early feedback on your idea. Don’t share the details of your manufacturing process with customers until you’ve locked up your intellectual property.” Just get out of the building.” Oops,” I said, “you’re right.

Vertical 149

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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. Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Dinner in a Strange Land When I was in my mid 20′s working at ESL, I was sent overseas to a customer site where the customers were our three-letter intelligence agencies. The conversation happened to hit on politics and culture and my friend’s’ wife innocently offered up she had lived in a commune in California.

Silicon Valley 184

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Austin Startup

AUGUST 7, 2017

One state — one Accelerator When Capital Factory opened our space in Austin in 2012, we were able to create a true center of gravity and then use that to connect together entrepreneurs, investors, customers, talent and press in meaningful ways. More connections means more business, more investors, more revenue, and more growth.

Texas 97

Texas San Antonio Houston Dallas 97

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

You can be an Independent studio or do “work for hire&# (either a revenue share or buy-out model) - If you’re an independent studio you have a set of choices for distribution channel and marketing models. - We understood none of this. More detail in future posts. steve Twitted by altgate , on July 2, 2009 at 5:22 pm Said: [.]

Silicon Valley 120

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Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

I’m sure its customers wonder, “Why is an organic grocer named RydeOn?”. In the world of technology companies, a pivot generally involves changing the product in a substantive way that changes how the company engages with its customers. The average customer acquisition cost of advertising on Yahoo or Netscape was well over $40.

Startup 36

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Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 13, 2011

The venture capital industry is so heavily skewed to Northern California, which the remains spilled over Boston, New York & Southern California. We will invest pre-revenue and even pre-product if we have discovered the right team in the right kind of market. There are of course other outposts like Austin and Seattle.

Cofounder 277

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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.

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

In fact, according to our Potrero benchmark suite this new board ran our customer applications ten times faster than our current products. This turned out to give our customers immense value. Now we could give customers lower price boards without Engineering spending 12 months to design new ones.)

Silicon Valley 134

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Start Up Blog

APRIL 29, 2013

We need to have a close look at the worlds two biggest social media networks of Twitter and Facebook – they run open API’s for each other to assist their customers and suppliers switch and share between each other. Cities are now becoming vertical again. Or the Enrico Resguardo Silvestre Hote l in Baja California.

Uruguay 123

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Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 13, 2016

It turns out that once you attract an audience to your channel and your brand becomes known for producing a genre of content you have an unfair advantage in acquiring customers for other shows who naturally migrate from one show to the next. This is the cycle of synergies that lead to strong vertical franchises in media. And so forth.

Vertical 150

Vertical Video South America Los Angeles 150

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Such is the power of being able to proactively identify which of your competitor's strategies are working well, where their current customers come from, and what specific tactics you should experiment with to create and advantage for yourself. I'm so surprised that California is missing from the top 7.

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