Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. His teenage daughter has Type 1 diabetes.

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

This isn’t just about having a eureka moment; it’s about understanding the problem you’re solving and why it matters to your potential customers. Then, consider how you’ll reach your customers and what kind of relationship you want to build with them.

Intellectual Property 132

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 132

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. They are gaining valuable customer data.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Convertible debt financings have become an increasingly attractive approach for seed rounds because it delays the valuation discussion, costs less from a legal standpoint, and is an easier financial instrument to “keep raising more small amounts of money” on. Soundbites from potential customers are encouraging.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 29, 2012

Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. The weekends aren't free: the cost is less than $100 but that covers all your meals and a chance to rub keyboards with other smart folks in your city who are interested in building something new and exciting.

St. Louis 135

St. Louis Kansas City Norway Kansas 135

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 27, 2014

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. Use the cloud and subscriptions for computing technology. With Google, you get all the storage you need in the cloud for free.

Entrepreneur 260

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media LLC 260

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom and test the first key hypotheses of their business model: The Value Proposition. Agora Cloud Services. How do we get past Amazon as the default cloud computing service provider?

Cloud 228

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 228

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

All of Intel’s resources – fabs, manufacturing strategies, and most importantly executive mindset — were geared towards large, expensive x86 processors, not low-cost mobile cores of someone else’s design. Their most profitable segment is very high-end processors used in data centers in servers and the cloud.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. to optimize this search.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Defective prototype code was as often thrown out (because customers didnt want it) as it was fixed (when customers did). Defective prototype code was as often thrown out (because customers didnt want it) as it was fixed (when customers did). Hence, cutting corners often paid huge dividends.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 9, 2018

They use the Business Model (or Mission Model ) Canvas to keep track of their key hypotheses and then rapidly test them by talking to customers and iterating their Minimal Viable Products. Customer Relationships. Diagram the Customer Segment Relationships. Start diagraming out the relationships of all the customer segments.

Marketing 321

Marketing Startup Government SEC 321

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

Well, a few months ago, I migrated the hosting for my Selective Tweets app to Amazon’s AWS cloud hosting platform. in hosting costs for an app with nearly a million registered users that serves several million requests a month. This should be a great example for anyone struggling to understand the concept of cloud computing.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure. That depends.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

Last week the teams tested their Revenue Models hypotheses: what are customers willing to pay for? Partners are the external companies whose product or service combines with your Value Proposition to create a complete customer solution or “whole product&# to satisfy customers. This looks like a race to the wire.

South Dakota 217

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 217

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

If we accept the verdict of customers instead of pundits, I think these claims are easy to dismiss. In practice, how developers respond to this dilemma is determined by their incentives, which are driven by the culture of their team. Who will ultimately bear the cost of their mistakes? How severely is failure punished?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Plus, we saw some of the intrinsic limitations of supporting such a large staff: slower cycle times, higher cost basis, and - most importantly - the ability to serve only a limited number of customer segments. So we tried to craft a strategy that would give us the product development leverage we needed to serve all customers.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development. It can help develop applications for the startup’s technology in its early days.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, The trade-off, though, is a more structured presentation format.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 27, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, As usual, if youre a reader, please come say hello - and bring your questions.

Lean 60

Lean Austin San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

You can keep the team focused on customer-centric results, rather than conformance to spec. Automated testing dramatically reduces the cost of certifying changes, because it removes all of the grunt work QA traditionally does in software. There are no customers for that feature, UI issues or no. I strongly disagree.

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

Each part of the program is organized around one phase of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop and begins with a keynote address from a heavy hitter: Steve Blank on Customer Development, Randy Komisar on "Getting to Plan B" and - a third person, not-yet-announced-but-extremely-cool-trust-me. Is design important to lean startups?

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. And they are cognizant that their funding is limited, and if they dont find out which features are absolutely critical for their customers soon, they wont be able to survive.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

You delight customers just like before. In an eyeballs business, you just cant seem to acquire or activate that next step-up of customers. Or your cost of customer acquisition just magically floats up to match your customer lifetime value. How to listen to customers, and not just the loud.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. what you think they might need) by talking to customers and testing every aspect of the product features, pricing, etc. Cash (alone) isn’t king.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven. If we already knew who the customer was, how they would behave, how much they would pay, and how to reach them, this wouldn’t be a disruptive innovation. If it costs $0.10 But $10.00?

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

bigs : @ericries says Stealth dev is a (undesirable, failure-presaging) customer-free zone. Another recent meme that I hope more and more startups will take to heart: "stealth is a customer-free zone." Although there is cost and overhead associated with continuous deployment, the benefits are immense. Danger, Will Robinson.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs. Customer support numbers, trouble-tickets, returns and complaints are good too. But they''re all lagging indicators. Consider a restaurant.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167