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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Lean vs. debt In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it. A similar relationship applies to technical debt.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. Great post! Great post!

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 20, 2012

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. On December 4 at The Lean Startup Conference, three of New York's top UX designers will lead a workshop we're really excited about, Lean Startup in the Enterprise. Lean teams cannot be micromanaged.

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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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

This thought was in my mind as I was reading Lean Analytics a new book by my friend Alistair Croll and his collaborator Benjamin Yoskovitz. In this post, we’ll look at each of the four steps in the Lean Analytics Cycle in more detail. If it's the number of people buying, the metric is conversion rate. But it is not routine.

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conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Extra Lucrative Conversion Advice. Conversion Optimization Services. Conversion Research. It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Ill exclude those non- lean startups who basically exist for the purpose of raising bigger and bigger sums of money. Now there was nothing wrong with their analysis: anyone who invents a technology as sophisticated as The Transformers is definitely going to make a lot of money. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer. For example, say that your business model calls for a 4% conversion rate – as ours did initially at IMVU. After a few months of early beta at IMVU, we discovered that our actual conversion rate was about 0.4%. Expo SF (May.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

I’ll definitely be more careful next time with my words… Reply Maurice Karnaugh , on April 7, 2009 at 6:28 pm Said: A good story and a well executed job. 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….”

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

I suggested the best place to start the conversation is with the 21 st century definition of a startup: A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. But running a Lean Startup inside an organization designed for execution is an exercise in futility.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

So I generally feel right at home in these conversations. So let’s turn our attention from what may happen in the future to what is definitely happening in the present. If they don’t, there are a new breed of lean startups who understand this deep in the bones ready to take their place. 12comments: Dougvs said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 1, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, May 1, 2009 Lean Startup webcast post-game Wow, what an incredible turnout for webcast this morning, right on the heels of a phenomenal crowd at startup2startup last night. Its been a great twelve hours for the lean startup! In a future post, Ill attempt to unpack this definition in detail.

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Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

JULY 1, 2010

You will find here a list of tools you can use during the customer discovery phase. KissMetrics is all about funnel conversion, which any web analytics tool already offers and having to add yet another script on your page isn’t justified by having pretty conversion graphs. Amazingly quick and easy tool. OyoLive is awesome!

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2016

I’d go to faculty meetings and realize, “These conversations are pointless, nobody wants to get anything out of this (meeting).” The other piece was that my partner had some of the Lean Startup process down cold. Definitely a better faculty member because it’s helped me talk to students in a different way.

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Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

JULY 1, 2010

You will find here a list of tools you can use during the customer discovery phase. KissMetrics is all about funnel conversion, which any web analytics tool already offers and having to add yet another script on your page isn’t justified by having pretty conversion graphs. Amazingly quick and easy tool. OyoLive is awesome!

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View from Seed

JANUARY 28, 2016

We don’t delineate between seed or pre-seed rounds, but as that definition has come into vogue, it’s clear that we are quite active as both “pre-seed investors” and “institutional seed investors.”. It creates focus and discipline and instills pressure to remain lean and not expand the team too quickly.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This reminded me of a conversation with one of my direct reports years before my daughter was born. Our conversation went like this: Me: Jim, how are we doing with getting Ansys ported? When I explained this to him, the conversation got heated. I realized that my daughter had confused motion with action.

Silicon Valley 324

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

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. From there, the conversation took a different trajectory. It was definitely a “Zen moment&# for me in terms of my career. Anybody else got some other ideas?&#

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

I promised to post the slides for my highly abbreviated version of the lean startup presentation, so here they are. 2009 09 08 The Lean Startup Gov 2.0 g2s The very abbreviated version of Customer Development (channeling Steve Blank ). g2s The very abbreviated version of Customer Development (channeling Steve Blank ).

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rob.by

MARCH 8, 2012

This isn’t because technical people are flakier or inherently less entrepreneurial; it’s because by definition they have a narrower set of highly in-demand skills. We’ve had some really good feedback so far, and I’m in a position where I can definitely answer the question posed by Dankhan below.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Step 1: Start with a lean plan. It’s the fastest way to get your idea onto paper, and it’s the very first step in the lean planning process, which is much easier and more iterative than traditional business planning methods. Introducing Lean Planning: How to Plan Less and Grow Faster. How to Write a Traditional Business Plan.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

So conversion rate percentage, of course it can always be higher and we’re doing a lot of stuff to make that higher, but it’s in line with other applications. Jason: Yeah, one percent conversion rate is pretty normal. I’ve had some very good conversations with a large insurance company. Jason: Okay. Edwin: Yes.

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viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

As a technical person, I’d definitely prefer a business person who has a little more technical experience. San Kim Definitely. In a Lean Startup-inspired business, where product development and customer development are closely aligned, you need both the tech and non-tech cofounders to understand each other's problems.

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andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. Eric Ries has a great article advocating for why it’s OK to Embrace Technical Debt.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. It may be that this stuff was only discussed in Engineering, or even Computer Science, but it is definitely part of the lore in those groups. Armstrong was a god!

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Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had. Great founders live for these moments. Creating the Entrepreneurial Personality – A Thought Experiment Fast forward three decades back to today. Let me know what you think. Does any of this match your experience or people you know?

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ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

On Sean’s GrowthHackers.com , categories include… So, essentially everything from customer development and onboarding to persuasion and social marketing fall under the umbrella of growth hacking. Peep Laja , ConversionXL : “I see growth hacking as traffic acquisition + conversion optimization.”

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Rob Go

JANUARY 28, 2016

We don’t delineate between seed or pre-seed rounds, but as that definition has come into vogue, it’s clear that we are quite active as both “pre-seed investors” and “institutional seed investors.”. In my prior post, I talked about the rise of the pre-seed and a more nuanced definition of a pre-seed based on milestones, not financing labels.

Cofounder 28

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Take a look at the companies who have raised money (and are still going) after competing: [link] Preparing the pitch for a year is definitely excessive, but I don’t see the harm done in taking a few weeks of doing brutally honest market validation, surveys, financial forecasts etc. You’ll learn a lot.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Laura is not only the author of UX for Lean Startup and the creator of the design blog Users Know , she’s also Head of Product at Hint Health, a software company working on healthcare affordability, and one of our most popular speakers. How does that work?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2012

through the Lean Launchpad class. He wanted to fly out to Stanford and sit in the Lean LaunchPad class about to start in the engineering school. This was most definitely not the hoodie and flip-flop crowd. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Technology. Syllabus for the class is here.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Notice that cohort and conversion based metrics do not suffer from this problem. When we look at the same conversion percentage for cohort after cohort, we are effectively getting a new, independent, report card for our efforts each period. Notice that cohort and conversion based metrics do not suffer from this problem.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 16, 2008 Engagement loops: beyond viral Theres a great and growing corpus of writing about viral loops, the step-by-step optimizations you can use to encourage maximum growth of online products by having customers invite each other to join. Thanks for being part of the conversation.

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maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

How to stay lean and iterate quickly while you’re building a two sided marketplace, especially when “network effect” and “critical mass” are the two main focuses? At the end of the conversation, ask them if they’d be willing to make an introduction. Intro in order of value (higher at the top). P.S. Do #1.

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Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

But after I had kids I definitely thought long and hard before I would jump on a plane. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups make the same point. The kids looked forward to them and we made them special.

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