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.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

We were sitting in our conference room in our first “system-planning meeting” trying to define the specifications of our new supercomputer and make the trade-offs between what was possible to build, and what customers in this new market would actually want and need. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

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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. The most extreme case (and my personal favorite) was by Armstrong who managed to create a full single conversion superheterodyne receiver all using a single vacuum tube! Armstrong was a god!

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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. Reply Karma in the Lean Startup Era , on January 28, 2010 at 5:26 pm Said: [.] The response from across the country?

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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 141

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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. Market Type changes everything. Market Type Changes Everything Here’s the point. .

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F. 2 weeks in they had outsourced my job, which lead to an awkward conversation.

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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.

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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? Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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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.

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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.

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I Hate Business Plan Competitions Yet this same conversation reminded me why every time students at Berkeley or Stanford tell me they’ve entered a technology business plan competition, I question whether they are wasting their time. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. I hate business plan competitions.

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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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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

We had some great conversations in the car, but one stuck in my mind. Unintended Lessons « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/09/28/unintended-lessons – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that. However, for the Web 2.0

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Now I mention this conversation not because the objection was dumb, but because objections like these happen all the time when you’re brainstorming. Customer Development.) And when you are brainstorming you really do want to hear all ideas and all possible pitfalls. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Just like the low conversion rate from going to bars (unless it’s for that one night interaction), this is the same for finding a co-founder. In Conversation.

Cofounder 47

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

By the time the security chief and I were having our ‘curly hairs in the envelope’ conversation, not only did I know what every single part of our site did, but what scared the security guy is that I had also put together a pretty good guesstimate of what other systems we had in place worldwide.

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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. Anybody else got some other ideas?&# It was definitely a “Zen moment&# for me in terms of my career. True? .&#

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

And I started to panic as it dawns on me that this conversation is occurring 30 times the 300 people in each of the 30 squadrons on this airbase. But that was the cue for 10 more people simultaneously to burst out with questions, (“How about motorcycles will they be OK? Can we go to the bathroom when the gravity is turned off?”)

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

This is also why I get so outraged when people treat Lean Startup like a religion. You can test theories like Lean Startup in your own practice, and discover if they deliver the outcomes they predict – and you can do it in small batches. You are the “hits&# that websites crave, the followers and the RSS subscribers.

San Francisco 167

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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.

Lean 38

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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.

Lean 32

Lean Customer Ruby Startup 32

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Lean Methodology Sources. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Part 3- Lean Cust. Steve Blank’s Lean Startup Resources. Lean Startup Circle â?? Customer Support. GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers. turn customer feedback into action.

Software Review 53

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Eric Ries’s astute observations about engineering and Lean Startups make the same point. However, I think if I had understood the basics of Customer Development I might have done 5-6 startups rather than 8 to get to retirement.

Entrepreneur 333

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market-by-numbers.com

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Follow my posts with RSS Follow me on Twitter. Customer Development Help Affordable Customer Development Support!

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rob.by

MARCH 8, 2012

Certainly using techniques such as customer development (www.custdev.com) and lean startup (minimum viable product) can help go a long way to giving the tech co-founder some early payback in terms of whether there will be any traction in the idea and reduce their inital involvment to get to prototype stage. Search: RSS Feed.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

So how do you get started with customer segmentation? If youve already been talking to customers one-on-one, dont stop now (and if you havent, this is still a good time to start). Those conversations are the best way to look for patterns in the noise. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

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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. It is known as a talking bar. micahtc 4 Dec 09 at 1:45 pm the amazon example is trivial.

Technical Review 47

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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.

Technical Review 44

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SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Will Price , October 11, 2010 Georgians Should Vote No - Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby , October 28, 2010 Free Software for Managing a Lean Startup - Platforms and Networks , January 17, 2010 Purpose Driven Life - Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur , July 26, 2010 Two Decade-Defining Acquisitions?

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