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. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter? Market Type changes everything.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. Customer Development.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products. The Customer is a Genius Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 26, 2018

In our experience, structured customer development work is right up there amongst the most valuable things a founder can do in the early days of their startup. Once you have an idea that feels strong, it’s imperative to speak with customers about it. But good customer development is tough to do.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Heres an excerpt: The Startups Rules of Speed - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Every startup that achieves success eventually faces a critical moment — whether to speed up or slow down.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. The company had hired a leading management consulting firm that helped them select 15 critical areas of change the Tsunami Initiative was tasked to work on. After the end of the day people gathered around the firepit for informal conversations.

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Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 389

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee. They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. Many founding teams fail because they’ve never had the conversation about founder, founding team and founding CEO. FIgure out who you are.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

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. If youre worried about disappointing some potential customers - dont be. Measure conversion rates. What is customer development?

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. When 3M brought “lead users” into its innovation process, they improved revenues by a factor of eight times over innovations from internal product developers. These are just a few of the powerful, growth-fostering impacts “Rock Star” customers are creating for a variety of companies.

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Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

September, 2012 – Andrew Chen, who currently does growth at Uber , writes You don’t need a growth hacker , which encourages companies to really consider whether they have product-market fit before hiring a growth hacker. Visitor-to-Customer Conversion – Using a CRO process, increase on-site conversions.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. I think Drucker said it best.

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YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 20, 2013

They’re afraid to hire, afraid to spend, afraid to risk. If you don’t, then how can you design and price your product and know whether it’s worth pursuing in the first place? Here are four steps you can build into the front end of your new product development process: Step 1: Identify benchmarking outcomes. Just… afraid.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

Id be honored to have you join the conversation. The Conversation - Harvard Business Review For most of us, the phrase management science conjures up a decidedly non-entrepreneurial image, and for good reason. Read the rest at The Conversation - Harvard Business Review. Id be honored to have you join the conversation.

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San Francisco Management Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It was always a welcome change of pace to leave the brown of the unchanging desert and travel into town and have dinner with them and have a non-technical conversation about books, theater, politics, travel, etc. Her husband would look at me out the corner of his eyes and then we’d segue the conversation to some other topic.

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 184

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. and for which customer?

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

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.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

The Five Whys for Start-Ups - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Root cause analysis and preventive maintenance are concepts we expect to see in a factory setting. The Five Whys for Start-Ups - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Root cause analysis and preventive maintenance are concepts we expect to see in a factory setting.

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Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

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. But where do those ideas come from in the first place?

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

And then we would use that simple analytics system I mentioned to monitor the conversion rates of customers from each campaign. Those rates gave us a map that told us a lot about our customers; insights that proved stable even when the company grew orders of magnitude bigger. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

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SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Each has its own iterative process: customer development and agile development respectively. Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. And how do you pick a new direction? Both are lethal outcomes.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

Customer development would be reduced to a single person exercise that could be repeated in parallel dozens of times over, ultimately yielding 30+ companies a year. on top of that often results in conversations and incentives that are difficult to overcome, especially early on in a company. Our model at Casual Corp.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

When I first encountered customer development , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs. Unfortunately, the video of our sllconf conversation is not online (due to technical problems), but we have a physical tape backup which we are endeavoring to get online soon.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

When it becomes possible to build products "live" with customers, the cycle time changes and design becomes a much more dynamic process. We still struggle to create Firm software that is defect-free, and it still requires customer insight (and maybe some customer development) to discover what will Delight.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

The way forward requires getting everyone together in a room, and having a conversation about where were headed. My aspiration with the Lean Startup methodology has always been to provide such a framework, so that we have more intelligent conversations about what works and what doesnt for startups. Thats what this conference is for.

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

Im excited that well get more than the usual few minutes of Q&A, so come with a healthy appetite for conversation. If you or your company is interested in sponsoring someone with a scholarship to travel to the expo and contribute to the conversation, please leave a comment or let me know. You heard me right.

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Lean San Francisco Web Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Way back when the money was doled out, the team made a compelling pitch about the large market that was going to adopt their new innovative product or service. Leave a comment or reply to someone else. Fostering that dialog is important.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

Conversion optimization is a form of kaizen. Conversion optimization is a form of kaizen. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I havent seen an equivalent of the systematic elimination of work-in-process inventory in Lean Startups, however.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Most of all, I encouraged them to start talking to their most passionate customers and running some big experiments based on that feedback. I thought we were having a successful conversation. Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Use some customer development to find out. The power of A/B testing is so under-exploited in product development, that Im trying new ways to explain its benefits. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Ive been there: is it me or my cofounder thats crazy?

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

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. So on the one hand.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

He summarized that conversation well, so rather than re-tread that material, Ill quote it here: One thing that I was surprised to learn was that IMVU started out with continuous deployment. They were deploying to production with every commit before they had an automated build server or extensive automated test coverage in place.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 131

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Another great way to test your idea is to create a minimum viable product, or MVP.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

The response so far has been nothing short of overwhelming, and I want to especially thank those of you who participated in the survey and customer validation exercise that helped shape this event. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? For now, Id like to ask a favor.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

If you find yourself getting asked non-key questions, try to use your answers to steer the conversation back to the key questions. 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 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 128