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.

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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

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.

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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. We were painting a picture of hypertext on every desktop computer. The response from across the country? To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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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.

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

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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. Now In Print!

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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? To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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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. As a pay-per-click marketer, now I will look at retail packaging as a source of ideas on landing page design. 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. To Order Outside of the U.S. I hate business plan competitions. You’ll learn a lot.

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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? Now In Print!

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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

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

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.

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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.

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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. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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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?”) Now In Print!

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

You can listen by subscribing to my podcast on iTunes , or it’s enclosed in this blog’s RSS feed , or you can just download the mp3 of the first hour. Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. 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. Being in a startup and having a successful relationship and family was very hard work. It takes two.

Entrepreneur 333

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news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

We already have some competitors in the vertical and while there is no point in trying to hide the actual idea, there are differences in the way we implement stuff that can get us an advantage over the competition. >> Google+twitter give live updates, but its not very conversational. Our idea is boring and not revolutionary.

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www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

conversion prospects/targets – This shows how many targets took action or showed interest enough to become prospects. conversion leads/prospects - This can be an indicator of the quality of your marketing materials in terms of how well it is prompting the right types of prospects to take action. . April Amrita Reply 13.

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