A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 2, 2013

Another thing they have in common: I find most high-tech startup founders are software engineers enamored with the idea of waking late, sidling up to a coffeeshop table, pecking away at an IDE, getting into the zone for hours at a stretch, and doing what they love – coding something of their own invention.

Cofounder 312

Cofounder Startup Founder Engineer 312

Steve Blank

JULY 24, 2012

The VC’s suggested I should spend a day at Onyx Software, an early pioneer in Sales Automation in Seattle. Their VP of Sales was about 6’ 3” and seemed to be almost as wide. But in that one day I had learned a lot about sales automation that would shape my thinking when we founded Epiphany. I Know A Great Customer.

Seattle 262

Seattle Cofounder Engineer Sales 262

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 145

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features. The founders were simply wrong about their assumptions about customer needs. It turns out the term “visionary founder” was usually a synonym for someone who was hallucinating. The founders.

Restful 235

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 235

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. In this workshop, Fraser, Founder/CEO of LUXr and Klein, Director of Product & UX at One Jackson will offer practical techniques for getting and using customer feedback.

Lean 154

Lean Cofounder Analytics Startup 154

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

But founders need to know how to ask for their advice and when to ignore it. Startup Insights From Paul English, Co-Founder of Kayak - OnStartups , May 10, 2010 I’m just wrapping up several weeks of attending conferences across both coasts. Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. It says what?!”).

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Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

The email continued, &# The problem I’m working on is that many founders are either making uninformed decisions or inefficiently learning the new skills they need. The solution I’m exploring is a just in time learning methodology that accelerates founders’ learning curve by aggregating relevant content, peers and mentors.&#.

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Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 334

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

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

product that barely worked, no sales organization (except tech support, which often works better anyway ), and I just hoped they’d run a credit card. Maybe you worked there or a co-founder or investor has some juice). make for not putting customer development before writing code. I had a $39.95

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Customer Software Review IP Technical Review 231

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. Social media facilitates marketing and sales. A programmer can build a new smartphone app for a few thousand dollars.

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Cost Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media 405

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. He was the CEO of two startups.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

Technology 141

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 141

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. And Jennifer is now my co-instructor in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class.). Sales channels. Delivery platforms.

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Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

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Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2014

It’s Not A Conversion Problem, It’s A Customer Development Problem. Think About Customer Experience, Not Just Conversion Optimization. Content & Co-marketing. Co-market with external vendors to promote new integrations (i.e How To Come Up With A Value Proposition In A Crowed Market. Affiliates.

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Developer API Cofounder New Jersey 104

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.

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Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

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.

North Carolina 128

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 128

The Next Web

JANUARY 27, 2013

One of the things I found most valuable from participating in the Founder Institute was a lesson about the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek. One of the biggest mistakes I made was flushing about $10,000 down the toilet on legal fees for a piece of paper that eventually didn’t suffice when two of our co-founders left the building.

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Netherlands Technical Review Software Review Cofounder 159

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. Jason: Yeah. Edwin: Yes.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

I read a ton of existing literature and came up with a formal methodology for search I called Customer Development. That resulted in a new process for Search: Customer Development + traditional product management/Waterfall Engineering. Berkeley asked me to teach a class in Customer Development.

Lean 321

Lean Georgia Michigan Business Model 321

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one. Years later he would become a venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital.)

Engineer 214

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 214

Up and Running

MAY 18, 2016

You’ll learn more about what destroys startups, how to use the Customer Development method to succeed, how to use the Business Model Canvas, how to identify and keep your customers, and how to drive profits. The Business Model Generation was co-created by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries.

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Startup Venture Capital Angel Investor Lean 80

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. Get product into customers’ hands.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Welcome to the Internet bubble.)

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 243

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

They are the co-authors of The Lean Entrepreneur , and the co-founders of the Moves the Needle Group , which advises the innovation practices of Fortune 100 companies. With sales and marketing experiments, often you pick low-hanging fruit in the millions of dollars very, very quickly.

Lean 167

Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2016

Thinking big, destiny and naysayers — three things in the life of a startup founder. Why founders need to be their own boss and how they capitalize on business opportunities were the focus of the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Stan Gloss. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were.

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Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur San Francisco 136

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales. is an AI bot which helps companies refine their sales pitch to VCs. Signal is a fundraising tool for founders run by NFX Guild, which identifies the most relevant VCs for you. . Pitchbot.vc 3) Originate investments.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2016

Thinking big, destiny and naysayers — three things in the life of a startup founder. Why founders need to be their own boss and how they capitalize on business opportunities were the focus of the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Stan Gloss. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur San Francisco 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 30, 2014

But a new class of life science/healthcare co-working and collaboration space is another. understand who their core and tertiary customers are, and the sales and marketing process required for initial clinical sales and downstream commercialization. A new life science/healthcare co-working and collaboration space.

San Diego 264

San Diego North Carolina Chicago Lean 264

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. What are some of the unique benefits and constraints from the point of view of a founder? . Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development.

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Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Steve Blank

JUNE 16, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. David Comisford , founder and CEO of EduSourced. Omar Zenhom , co-founder of The $100 MBA. Go hire a sales exec to scale? David Comisford.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Ohio 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

For example, over 25% of the technology companies founded between 1995-2005 had a key immigrant founder. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. Similarly, 24% of all the patents filed in the US in 2006 had a foreign resident as inventor or co-inventor.

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San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121