Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

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. And the converse is true; Palm would have failed, burning through all their cash, using Handspring’s strategy.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

No, the conversation was about to get more interesting. We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This methodology forces rapid hypothesis testing and Customer Development by getting out of the building while building the product. billion U.S.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2021

The key to understanding value propositions is in building interviews that are based on a set of hypotheses (about the problem, the stakeholder and potential solutions to be explored) and data to be captured while using minimum viable products (just enough “product” to increase the efficacy of a conversation and increase the speed of learning).

Curation 344

Curation Technical Review Lean Australia 344

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2024

Now we were in discussions with the potential buyers who had the corporate checkbook, and they were ready to have a “next step” conversation. Our conversions of demos into orders went through the roof. A few critical internal recommenders and technical evaluators gave our concept the thumbs up.

Founder 325

Founder Engineer Sales Conversion 325

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. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. The Adventure Begins.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2014

1:49: Use Customer Development to Test Your Hypotheses. 4:24: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers. Module 2, Getting Out of the Building: Customer Development. 0:24: What is Customer Development? 1:09: How Do You Start the Customer Development Process?

Intellectual Property 328

Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development Acquisition 328

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

I use the Investment Readiness Level as part of my sessions to help the students understand that being ready for investment means that besides having a pretty PowerPoint, they need to do real work and show Customer Development progress. Since I began incorporating the Investment Readiness Level framework I’ve made three observations.

Sacramento 306

Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 306

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2021

I pointed out that once he had potential customer, regulator, and reimbursement data from his Discovery interviews, he could bring that data into conversations with his CEO. Having real data turns conversations from faith-based to evidence-based. Having real data turns conversations from faith-based to evidence-based.

Lean 435

Lean Agile Conversion Business Model 435

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

(There is a huge difference between the Chinese who have never left and those who went to school abroad, even for a few months – at least a difference in their ability to relate to me and have a conversation on the same wavelength. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The Customer is a Genius Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products. And soon the conversation were about architectural tradeoffs and then how customers didn’t appreciate the elegant designs and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of these commodity microprocessors.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

That kicked off this long conversation about how you might try to leverage this evolution of education technology to create scalable impact in places where tuition couldn’t be the driver of growth. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Cofounder 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

That kicked off this long conversation about how you might try to leverage this evolution of education technology to create scalable impact in places where tuition couldn’t be the driver of growth. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

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. the Customer Life Time (CLT)).

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

(There is a huge difference between the Chinese who have never left and those who went to school abroad, even for a few months – at least a difference in their ability to relate to me and have a conversation on the same wavelength. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2013

” conversation with investors. (If The competitive diagram is how develop your first hypotheses about who your customers are. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital. Customer Development Teaching Venture Capital' The Petal Diagram drives your business model canvas.

Venture Capital 335

Venture Capital Customer Development Business Model Lean 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique.

Oakland 301

Oakland Asia Lean Video 301

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

We had an almost identical conversation when the subject turned to hiring a Public Relations agency. Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” I took a deep breath and said, “Look this is just like the channel consultant conversation. Don’t you have 5,000 existing customers? Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 314

PR China Lean Channel 314

Steve Blank

APRIL 3, 2012

We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. We had a couple of minutes to catch up between sessions and the conversation got strangely awkward when I asked him how their startup was going. Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun ?/i?pif?n?/.

Flash 313

Flash Customer Development Business Model Developer 313

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2021

The conversation got interesting when I asked, “How are you going to describe the product to potential customers in the concrete industry?” So it seemed logical to him that the concrete industry was going to be one the first places to approach since it was obvious that they need to reduce carbon emissions.

Product 429

Product Advisory Board Green Customer 429

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

As the conversation began to get down to how much stock and salary we could offer van Dam, we left the barber to finish his work and went to a payphone to call our CEO to confirm the deal. We were painting a picture of hypertext on every desktop computer. The response from across the country?

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2013

This team got my attention when they said, “Let us tell you about our conversations with potential customers.” Filed under: Customer Development. Customer Development' A minimum viable product is not always a smaller/cheaper version of your final product. Think about cheap hacks to test the goal.

Product 335

Product Customer Development Forecast Engineer 335

Steve Blank

AUGUST 22, 2011

Part of each conversation was getting asked to help them put together a “job spec.”. Now with the data in front of you, the conversation about hiring can start. Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology. I had them leave with a pie chart.

Hiring 290

Hiring Non-Compete Search Customer Development 290

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

“I’ve been running our company, cycling through Customer Discovery and Validation and the board suggested that I was running out of bandwidth and needed some help in closing our initial orders. I knew where this conversation was going. What Rajiv needed to hire was a VP of Customer Development and part ways with his VP of Sales.

Startup 312

Startup Business Model Customer Development Bandwidth 312

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs : [link] [link] [link] However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) That’s 10x what many websites convert.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2015

Customer Development for us meant a lot of hard-won learnings. But in her own family, at the dinner table, she would read a book while everybody else was conversing. Because following the conversation when multiple people were talking around her was impossible. There was no going back. This was a big opportunity.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Lean Customer Development Startup 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The Trojan Horse “Well…” I said hesitantly, “I’m not sure we should share this with you but we have a set of benchmarks that we use to measure performance….” Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

Smart companies will figure out how to educate their customers and communicate these changes. The Old Days – Waterfall Product Development. skip this part of you’re conversant in Waterfall and Lean.). If your subscription revenue model “fires” a portion of your customers, i t may enable new competitors.

Continuous Deployment 329

Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 329

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

We had an almost identical conversation when the subject turned to hiring a Public Relations agency. Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” I took a deep breath and said, “Look this is just like the channel consultant conversation. Don’t you have 5,000 existing customers? Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 206

PR China Lean Channel 206

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2014

We will continue our conversations, and I fully expect that Steve, Alex and I will have more to say about how best to structure and support new ventures inside a large corporation in future posts! Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Customer Development.

Startup 327

Startup Business Model Lean Russia 327

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Each week the teams marched through another box of the canvas, testing their hypotheses in front of beneficiaries using the customer development methodology, all while building and updating their minimal viable product. Or conversely business team members draw timelines and costs without a deep understanding of the technology hurdles.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

As the conversation progressed, we agreed about the ways to manage projects using a few operating principles of Lean/Agile project management (without ever mentioning the words Lean or Agile.). More importantly we decided that he would focus these conversations on outcomes rather than reports. They just want to see the paperwork.).

Agile 64

Agile Lean Leadership Conversion 64

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery , iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture.

Customer Development 330

Customer Development Cofounder Later Stage Software 330

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. All the presentations are worth a watch. Team: Panacea.

Oakland 266

Oakland Lean SBIR Afghanistan 266

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2018

The first half of the conversation talks about Lean and its origins. I sat down with Arvind Gupta , Founder and Managing Director of IndieBio and talked about how Lean methods apply to Life Sciences. If you can’t see the video click here. The second half focuses on its applicability in Digital Health and Life Sciences.

Lean 248

Lean San Francisco Programming Video 248