Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Hire around you to fill those weak spots. …. Nayeem : I didn’t, no.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 In all of these new product and cost-focused new trends, a big problem has emerged that all of these movements have not addressed. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small?

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully-formed go to market function.”. Then, pluck the low-hanging fruit: easy, low-cost, and highly scalable infrastructure. Customer Development. Organize events in your vertical. Is the service scaleable?

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

The Next Web

MAY 4, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. One of the last entrepreneurs I met on a funding trip, ended up raising a $6M round in Italy. If you have no network, you will not be able to hire the best people in San Francisco.

San Francisco 159

San Francisco Europe Technical Review Due Diligence 159

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Ari Newman is an entrepreneur, mentor, investor, and a friend. He works at Techstars where his responsibility is to ensure that the connections between alumni, mentors, and staff are as robust as they can be – helping entrepreneurs “ do more faster ” day in and day out.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

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. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.”

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? what Market Type is your startup?

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

So far, I have found "lean startup" works better with the entrepreneurs Ive talked to than "agile startup" or even "extreme startup.") The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. No, not really.

Silicon Valley 141

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 29, 2012

Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. The weekends aren't free: the cost is less than $100 but that covers all your meals and a chance to rub keyboards with other smart folks in your city who are interested in building something new and exciting.

St. Louis 135

St. Louis Kansas City Norway Kansas 135

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

We hired union laborers to do that. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. It will cost you your job.” Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that their job was not to set up booths.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. Am I in a company with “invention risk? Or does my company have both types of risk?

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Yet this same network of connected people affects who gets funded, how startup teams form, and who gets hired. . The program examines the DNA of entrepreneurs: what makes them tick, how they came up with their ideas; and explores the habits that make them successful, and the highs, lows that pushed them forward. Wayne Sutton.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Carolina Cofounder Entrepreneur 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

And world-class entrepreneurs never quit. How founders cope with startup challenges was the focus of today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. Jessica Mah started InDinero in 2010 to help entrepreneurs with their accounting and tax needs after going through the same challenges with her own businesses. Jessica Mah.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market. Agile software development. Customer development. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers dont want.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Entrepreneurs see opportunity where others see obstacles and why hubris is an entrepreneur’s worst enemy, were two topics of discussion on my SiriusXM radio show, Entrepreneurs are Everywhere. When you’re an entrepreneur, yeah, there’s 100 gaps. Ajay Kshatriya. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Entrepreneurs see opportunity where others see obstacles and why hubris is an entrepreneur’s worst enemy, were two topics of discussion on my SiriusXM radio show, Entrepreneurs are Everywhere. When you’re an entrepreneur, yeah, there’s 100 gaps. Ajay Kshatriya. Joining me in the Stanford University studio were.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

Software Review 141

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 141

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. He was looking for a communications chip that could cut parts cost to build an innovative new type of computer – which turned out to be the Mac.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

in hosting costs for an app with nearly a million registered users that serves several million requests a month. But if tools are plentiful and costs resemble rounding errors, what stands in the way of the would-be entrepreneur of 2012? Derek Sivers: How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen. In short, talent.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.) Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Technology Continuous Deployment Lean 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

It costs not just the time of the actual meeting, but the time getting there and back, and the time preparing for it beforehand and thinking about it afterward. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh).

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. I have counseled innumerable entrepreneurs to change their focus to revenue, and many companies who refuse this advice get themselves into trouble by running out of iterations. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

Case studies Serious entrepreneurs not wannabes actual nuts and bolts, Im sold ont he phiilosophy debates of contentious issues - not just yes men" "Some of the core personalities of the group, a number of startups (who have already achieved fit etc and have success) who can talk from experience." Detailed case studies of how it was done.

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2010

They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. So I met the entrepreneur and asked him how his search for a business model was going. We’re in Customer Validation but we can’t seem to close a deal.” Hmm, I asked, “Can you go back to the beginning and tell me about your Customer Discovery process?

Founder 199

Founder Cofounder Business Model Customer Development 199

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. Bring your questions.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Finally the amount of capital needed to take a drug to FDA trials could be enormously expensive, at least 10x more than startup costs at an electron-based company. The advantage of commodity software stacks drops initial startup costs for Internet Commerce companies. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital.

Lean 258

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 258

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Other companies accomplish this by hiring a large staff of content production experts - and get a very good result. Plus, we saw some of the intrinsic limitations of supporting such a large staff: slower cycle times, higher cost basis, and - most importantly - the ability to serve only a limited number of customer segments.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 27, 2009

Im going to be speaking on June 3rd at an event sponsored by the Technology Entrepreneurs Exchange (TeXchange), "the premier networking organization in Texas for business executives and entrepreneurs to meet, exchange ideas and share experiences." It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0,

Lean 60

Lean Austin San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Entrepreneurs today expect more than just capital from their investors. Teten: The new generation of entrepreneurs is asking more from their investors than just money. What do they offer entrepreneurs that independent VCs cannot, and how does that position them uniquely in the innovation economy? Are they good sales people?

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

The team hired only the best and the brightest. And lastly, it removes the engineering team’s ability to find breakthrough solutions that might deliver most of the value at a fraction of the cost. The team hired only the best and the brightest. I once worked at a startup with an exceptional functional department system.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164