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. Perhaps you can determine whether a product is new by asking customers to name the competition.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Imagine a chart that’s 300 lines long for each component and you have to strategize when you’re going to buy this component and how far in advance you need to purchase it in order to get the price you need to get your cost of goods sold low enough that you’re going to make money on this thing. . Orders increased.

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Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” – word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

Technology 145

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents. It will cost you your job.” We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), That kind of accountable.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. You may know it by its final name. But to get video to fit and playback on the computers of the era, they needed to compress it. But you probably never heard of ReelTime.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. Gorbachev, now the Soviet Premier, had to grapple with the spiraling cost of military systems that weren’t amortized by consumer purchases. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 201

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Startups could now get a first version of a product out to customers in weeks/months rather than months/years. For a specific startup this list is probably a few hundred names.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works. What did you discover from customers?

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 318

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America?

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Venture Capital 270

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And 30 years later I was teaching in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him. In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers. Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. Play spooky music here.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 210

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals. What happened to him? Who was he?

Silicon Valley 184

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 184

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Startup 2 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and we are going to offer a lower-cost, web-based version. Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 210

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 271

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Before co-founding Biota Technology , he was an investor and entrepreneur-in-residence at Seed Capital , a investing in science-based innovation. Switching from venture capital to startup founder required a different mindset, Ajay said: All day in a VC firm, you’re saying ‘no’. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Before co-founding Biota Technology , he was an investor and entrepreneur-in-residence at Seed Capital , a investing in science-based innovation. Switching from venture capital to startup founder required a different mindset, Ajay said: All day in a VC firm, you’re saying ‘no’. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 207

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. The importance of a domain name. For Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin, finding a good domain name was a key part of his branding strategy. venture capital. or even be a U.S.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. You never heard of them because their work was secret.

Silicon Valley 302

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 302

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I’ve seen a range of options for supporting entrepreneurs, which I can rank from least to most involvement in companies by investors: financier VCs, e.g., Correlation Ventures. portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures. mentor VCs, e.g., most VCs.

Software Development 60

Software Development Software Developers Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Silence.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He took out an ad in the Yellow Pages (it was the early 80′s, pre Internet), which cost him $1,000 / month for a half-page ad. That gave Google a huge cost advantage. He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards.

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Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect. Discovering that your worldview is wrong or mistaken can be a life-changing event.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 215

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Edwin: Correct, I fully agree and the name MeetingKing already says that my initial focus definitely was on meetings, right? Now what I’ve found is that especially the larger licenses, 10- and 25-user licenses, in the beginning I lost those customers after a couple of months. But we’re just not going to name them as ideal.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2015

He teaches at the NYU School of Engineering , and for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps , and co-author with Giff Constable of Talking to Humans: Success Starts With Understanding Your Customers. Frank has spent 20+ years in technology companies and venture capital, working at Lucent , Sun Microsystems , Apple and NeXT.

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Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Investment Bankers 120

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. The project was so low cost they did not even want to bother with it. Thus why I decided to wait until the market allowed for low cost investment. Johnny Good post.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Our calculations had us losing money on the two lowest cost boards, breaking even on the third and making great margins on the other six. As customers saw them, they were a new family of products aimed directly at the color desktop publishing market with astonishing performance and a low-cost entry price.

Silicon Valley 149

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 149

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. Customer development isn’t just for [.] However the U.S.

Silicon Valley 286

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 286

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

At first only the national laboratories and the largest companies could afford to buy supercomputers, (the Cray-1 cost ~$9 million) but over time scientists and researchers were also starting to use them. Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.”

Silicon Valley 172

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 172

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I lived through the time when working in my first job in Ann Arbor Michigan we had to get out a map to find out that San Jose was not only in Puerto Rico but there was a city with that same name in California. Today open source software has slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands.

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Restful Silicon Valley San Jose Puerto Rico 249

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

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Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Venture Capital Cafe > Startup Resources (Updated Mar 2013). Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Add a class name to buttons, forms, quotes, etc. tells you how much adwords cost. hire low-cost international engineering talent. Boilerplate Venture Funding Documents. About VC Cafe.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53