Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 252

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

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Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 303

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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

But things like vendor introductions are only needle-movers at the earliest stages. 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.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

Innofund is designed to bridge early stage technology companies that have innovative technology and good market potential but are too early for commercial funding (banks or VCs.) Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

Programming 175

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 175

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

The first time a few brave corporate innovators tried to overlay the Lean tools and techniques that work in early-stage startups in an existing corporation, the result was chaos, confusion, frustration and ultimately, failure. Innovation and improvement occurs in Horizon 1 on process, procedures, costs, etc.

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Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

They accomplished their goal, but at a huge, unanticipated cost: the processes and committees they designed ended up strangling innovation. There was no burden on those who proposed a new idea or technology to talk to customers, build minimal viable products, test hypotheses or understand the barriers to deployment. Legal issues.

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Incubator Curation Engineer Government 316

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. It bears repeating: an early-stage startup must focus on making one customer group excited by a mission-aligned product.

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Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation. The heart of the Cafepress presentation is the “ Lessons Learned from our Customers ” section. Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 234

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Following is his advice to early stage entrepreneurs for creating structure in their company. One of the key benefits of doing this early on is that when it comes time to raise that next round, the people you’ll need the most help from are already involved and engaged. Soundbites from potential customers are encouraging.

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Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

View from Seed

DECEMBER 8, 2015

We have a bias towards very early stage investing for a bunch of reasons, but it’s not easy. It’s often a good idea for founders to find a way to build something and get some early market validation before raising outside capital. I think this stage, more than others, is very dependent on the individual investor.

Product 120

Product Startup Early Stage Seed Capital 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc.

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 305

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Lessons to Learn By the time I joined Ardent I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit. Get Out of My Company At the top of his lungs he screamed, “You don’t know a damn thing about what these customers need!

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Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 282

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

Technology 142

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 142

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

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Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 329

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

Cost pressures are unrelenting in every sector, with pressure on prices and margins continuing to increase. Early stage Venture Capital for medical device startups has dried up. Exits have remained within about the same, while the cost and time to exit have doubled. Business Model Issues. Venture Capital Issues.

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Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 299

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. Sources like Crunchbase , Angel List , and Seed Invest even give this data away for free or very low cost.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Thanks for sharing the lessons you’ve learned, especially the ones where the cost is measured in years. If you are entrepreneur with a solid business that actually makes money you would know that VC has the highest cost of capital imaginable and would find better options.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs. Intellectual Property At the next class I said, “You all ought to get out and start talking to customers on day one, and get early feedback on your idea. You don’t need to worry about any Intellectual Property (IP) issues. Yeah, I said.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 154

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

You’re obviously not showing charts of user growth, number of customers, or revenue. But even as a concept stage company there are ways to show progress with your business. This might involve an alpha/beta phase were the product is built and refined with “live” but unpaid customers. B) Post-Product Companies.

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Seed Stage B2B Seed Capital Revenue 149

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. I got to spend time inside his company while I was using their software to analyze early-stage ventures. And that’s where the problem was.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 320

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

The term “Growth Hacking”, invented by Sean Ellis , and made popular by Andrew Chen , a Silicon valley marketer and entrepreneur, is a combination of two disciplines – marketing and coding: Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?”

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API Viral Startup Retention 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

. • Repeatable: Startups may get orders that come from board members’ customer relationships or heroic, single-shot efforts of the CEO. Does our product or service solve a customer problem (product-market fit)? How do we attract, keep and grow customers? And what are its costs? What problems do they want solved?

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Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 334

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 9, 2018

They use the Business Model (or Mission Model ) Canvas to keep track of their key hypotheses and then rapidly test them by talking to customers and iterating their Minimal Viable Products. Customer Relationships. Diagram the Customer Segment Relationships. Start diagraming out the relationships of all the customer segments.

Marketing 324

Marketing Startup Government SEC 324

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, March 13, 2009 Dont launch Heres a common question I get from startups, especially in the early stages: when should we launch? Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Do your customers really read TechCrunch? If not, do not launch there.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 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. I recently joined CoVenture , an early-stage venture capital firm that develops products and invests cash in exchange for equity.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2010

They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. 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? Customer Development is the process of how you get out of the building and search for the model.

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Founder Cofounder Business Model Customer Development 222

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc. the manager followed us still yelling. And that’s just to get started.

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 308

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

. • Repeatable: Startups may get orders that come from board members’ customer relationships or heroic, single-shot efforts of the CEO. Does our product or service solve a customer problem (product-market fit)? How do we attract, keep and grow customers? And what are its costs? What problems do they want solved?

Venture Capital 226

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 226

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. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Startup 2 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and we are going to offer a lower-cost, web-based version.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2012

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made ~ 2,000 customer calls in 10 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. If we’re correct, we can compress the time for commercializing scientific breakthroughs and reduce the early stage risks of these new ventures. Syllabus for the class is here.

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America Rhode Island Southern California Illinois 244

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service. The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. The best way to do this is to get out and talk to your potential customers.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

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. So that means stuff like thinking about what a business model might be, it does mean customer development. So I have a question for you, Jason.

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Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs. Customer support numbers, trouble-tickets, returns and complaints are good too. But they''re all lagging indicators. Consider a restaurant.

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Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

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. This was actually a great piece of advice, because ideas change and evolve in the early stages of the startup, it’s about the other person not the idea as much.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

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

Vertical 135

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 135