Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. However, four critical advances over the past decade (cloud, accelerators, Lean, and Angels) not only changed the math for tech investing but made regional tech clusters possible.

Early Stage 287

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 287

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? Reminder: What’s the Point of Talking to Customers ?

Customer 415

Customer Business Model Restful Video 415

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 300

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 300

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 324

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 324

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

Agile is a tremendous advance in reducing time, money and wasted product development effort – and in having products better match customer needs. And these changes may have unintended consequences leading to customer dissatisfaction and confusion. Waterfall – The Customer View. Adobe and Tesla offer two examples.

Continuous Deployment 330

Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 330

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

The growth of social networking, the spread of mobile devices, and the advances in the use of cloud computing have changed how people consume content from the news and media industry. It has also made it easy for them to deliver content to different devices, hence reaching a large number of customers.

API 106

API Media Agile Technical Review 106

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 4, 2019

Nowadays we have cloud computing, which presents limitless storage capabilities. Cloud computing or rather the cloud can be described as the process of using a network of remote servers that are internet-based to process, manage and store data. The Different Types of Cloud Computing. Different Cloud Services.

Cloud 81

Cloud Artificial Inteligence Matching Hosting 81

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

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.

Cost 405

Cost Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media 405

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

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

Advisory Board 151

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

Steve Blank

JULY 24, 2012

I Know A Great Customer. And along with that first customer hypothesis I had the brilliant hypothesis that my channel partner should be Onyx. We shipped a complete server up to Onyx (this is long before the cloud) and they assured us they would start evaluating it. Filed under: Customer Development , E.piphany , Marketing.

Seattle 260

Seattle Cofounder Engineer Sales 260

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 128

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 128

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2014

Today, you need ways to keep customers coming in the door. It’s the ability to “stalk” your potential customers all over the web. The customer saw your ad on a totally unrelated web search or a website. It can also annoy customers if they catch on that you’re following them all over the web. Incentivize Customer Loyalty.

Customer 244

Customer Retention Programming Customer Development 244

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. A VC asked me to have lunch with the CEO of a startup building cloud-based enterprise software. He went through his product feature by feature and matched them to the customer problems. Sales Process.

Forecast 272

Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 272

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

He is a senior advisor to several multinational corporations and a recognized thought leader on corporate innovation, big data, cloud computing, and digital marketing platforms. Filed under: Customer Development. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2013

To indicate where their customers for this new market would come from they drew the 5 adjacent market segments : corporate, higher education, startup ecosystem, institutions, and adult learning skills that they believed their future customers were in today. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital.

Venture Capital 335

Venture Capital Customer Development Business Model Lean 335

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

My first company launched in 1999 and we were offering a SaaS document management in the cloud (we were called ASPs back then). We made lots of assertions about what features we thought people would want, how to price them and how to overcome the objections that people have to managing data in the cloud. Another example.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 12, 2015

With new online technology, lean resources (think food cart/truck versus restaurant), cloud everything, you can “test” an idea with low risk and not too much money. Here is what I believe might be three things to make you think, and perhaps do: Know the Major Customer Groups. Do you look at large customer segments?

San Diego 100

San Diego United States Technical Review Lean 100

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. Soundbites from potential customers are encouraging. At month six, one of the early hires leaves, a developer who turns out wasn’t a good fit. Investors are dismayed that there are no real customers yet.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 25, 2014

The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions – crowdspring.co/1nHT6tS. The Ultimate List of Customer Development Questions – crowdspring.co/1nHT6tS. Amazon and Google are in an epic battle to dominate the cloud—and Amazon may already have won | Quartz – crowdspring.co/1eVLm7M. 1nHSu7x.

Social Media 92

Social Media Small Business Design Media 92

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

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). Customer development. This speeds up the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop. This post has been removed by the author.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 29, 2012

Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. You also get a $50 credit for hosting and cloud computing services per each team, something that came in handy for those teams doing some Big Data implementations.

St. Louis 135

St. Louis Kansas City Norway Kansas 135

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 232

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 232

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 17, 2016

How they think and feel; their sense of community; and their appetite to share their opinions are all creating new paradigms for how any business, regardless of size, connects with its customers. According to our research, millennials ardently avoid calling customer service. Old school customer service rules haven’t changed.

Customer 100

Customer Singapore Advisory Board Asia 100

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. We finally settled on a $1.99 Setup a simple website.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

He had an idea for a new class of enterprise software insight-as-a-service based on big data web analytics as a Cloud/SaaS (Software As a Service) application. Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. But Bob said he was worried he hadn’t found the right customer segment yet.

Customer Development 330

Customer Development Cofounder Later Stage Software 330

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Their most profitable segment is very high-end processors used in data centers in servers and the cloud. They’re better than large companies at identifying customer needs/problems and finding product/market fit by pivoting rapidly. On the low-end, they undercut cost structures, resulting in customer migration.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

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

OCTOBER 3, 2016

For example, customers usually have a good intuitive understanding of the problem they have. Prior to Aster, Ajeet worked at Oracle where he was part of the team that first launched Oracle Database to the Amazon EC2 cloud. Companies like MySpace and LinkedIn became some of our biggest customers. You can scale much better.

Cofounder 276

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 276

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

For example, customers usually have a good intuitive understanding of the problem they have. Prior to Aster, Ajeet worked at Oracle where he was part of the team that first launched Oracle Database to the Amazon EC2 cloud. Companies like MySpace and LinkedIn became some of our biggest customers. You can scale much better.

Cofounder 276

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 276