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

SEPTEMBER 9, 2014

As an entrepreneur my problem was that I had too many ideas. I realized the innovation/entrepreneurship process needed a “foundation” – the skills and processes that kick-start an entrepreneurs imagination and creative juices. There is an insatiable demand for innovation and entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneur 335

Entrepreneur Framework Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. We hired union laborers to do that.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

For the last few years, there really hasn’t been a demand to innovate on top of the ecosystem that’s been built. The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. There’s a noticeable lack of tenacity in young, new entrepreneurs.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

Values – who and what founders and customers hold dear – were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. 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 and lows that pushed them forward.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 145

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

It was an educational mission to tell the story of who our customers were (and by inference who all the graphics board customers were) and why the current reviews of these graphics boards weren’t adequately measuring what was important to this large market. Theoretically, that’s why I hired them.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. The Embrace infant warmer was developed - by getting out of the country -- and how Rob Emrich learned and scaled his non-profit, Road of Life.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Having just retired from a career as an entrepreneur I had started thinking about why startups were different from large companies. 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.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

Values – who and what founders and customers hold dear – were the focus on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. 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 and lows that pushed them forward.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Your design or ad agencies can impress you with their awards, but if you’re not moving product or creating demand, you’ve missed the point.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

For some entrepreneurs this idea that the founder is not necessarily the CEO, is a surprise. If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee. Key attributes of an entrepreneur on a founding team are passion, determination, resilience, tenacity, agility and curiosity. It’s my idea!”

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

What those sites have in common (despite their very different audiences) is that something is causing their customers to become addicted to their product, and so no matter how they acquire a new customer, they tend to keep them. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 29, 2008 The ABCDEFs of conducting a technical interview I am incredibly proud of the people I have hired over the course of my career. This second objective plays no small part in allowing you to hire the best. Hiring decisions are among the most difficult, and the most critical.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

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.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

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

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Customer development. For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought Id include a few links. For customer development, start with Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany or take a look at his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. You’ll never have to do it again.) Trade Show Post Mortem Evaluate the experience.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

As I present in my blog, defining the MVP requires answering the following question: "Will our customers be willing to buy the product with these features - available at this date - at this price?" Iterate quickly to uncover true market demands. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. Bring your questions.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

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. Demand creation for subsequent iPods can be about the features not about the new idea of iTunes+sync+iPod. Market Type But most startups aren’t in existing markets.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

A lot of entrepreneurs think that their startup is the next big thing when in reality they’re just building a small business. They used Customer and Agile development to search for a scalable and repeatable business model to become a large company. The word entrepreneur covers a lot of ground. Make no little plans.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. Lean Startup Circle - a mailing list of dedicated and helpful entrepreneurs.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

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

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

These diagrams are the visual representation of the how and the what a team learned in the class – how they tested their hypotheses by getting out of the building using the Customer Development process and what they learned about each part of their business model. The students were challenged to get users, orders, customers, etc.

Lean 279

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 279

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. You would think that would be enough to get wrong, but entrepreneurs and investors compound this problem by assuming that all startups grow and scale by executing the Revenue Plan.

Revenue 230

Revenue Balance Sheet Hockey Stick Burn Rate 230

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Thanks to Suns amazing PR blitz, there was tremendous demand for experts on Java, and I did my best to convince people that I was one of that mythical breed.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

I believe the only way to improve our chances as entrepreneurs is to develop a working theory of entrepreneurship. Sure, when entrepreneurs create startups that grow up into mature companies, they become part of an established industry, with its own ecosystem, norms, partners and best practices.

San Francisco 122

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 122

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If I have some budget for outside help, should I hire a vendor to help us drive down our payment fraud rates by 1% (ROI easy to predict), or hire a market research firm to give us insights into potential customers (ROI hard to predict)? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

It’s important to note that system I’m about to explain evolved organically in response to new demands on the system and in response to post-mortems of failures. Nobody gets here overnight, but every step along the way has made us better developers. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online. Lean Startup Circle - a mailing list of dedicated and helpful entrepreneurs.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Customers kept demanding that we add this or that IM feature, and we were routinely refusing. We were afraid that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that once we “gave in&# to these five demands there would be five more, ad infinitum. Every time you listen to customers, you fear diluting your vision.

Advisory Board 151

Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

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

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

By delegating and training, we create a corps of leaders who could step in to provide CTO-like services on demand. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Ha. What if someone wanted to write their module in OOP style?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

As the company grows, hes the go-to person for almost everything technical, and so hes very much in demand. And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

One common worry is that this might lead companies to “release crap,&# shipping too soon with a product of such low quality that it alienates potential customers and, thus, causes entrepreneurs to abandon their vision. What if customers actually like the “crap&# product? I understand this fear.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Software Review 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

When I tell this story to entrepreneurs and big-company types alike, I sometimes get this response: "well, sure, if you start out with all those great tools, processes and TDD from the beginning, thats easy! The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? One last comment.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156