Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

In fact, I work with a pioneering group of C-level and forward-thinking marketing executives who are successfully replacing this increasingly dated model with something that customers actually welcome and respond to. It’s a myth that social networks and their technologies are creating new approaches to marketing.

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Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Heres my take.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

As Ive written previously , lean startups are built upon three main trends: Technology commoditization. It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO).

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in Customer Development. Demand creation for subsequent iPods can be about the features not about the new idea of iTunes+sync+iPod.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

In fact, at the time (1996-1997) we offered both a downloadable product, that our customers could install on their own servers, and a “hosted-offering”, which came to be known as “On-Demand”, then the “ASP” (Application Service Provider) model, and today we call it “SaaS” (Software as a Service).

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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. For Neopets, its simply a side-effect of their game-like product design.

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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.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Playing with new technologies. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers. Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. What is customer development? Seeing whats possible.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. Scott Summitt iteratively leveraging the emerging technologies of digital fabrication and 3d-scanning to change people's lives. The result: a new idea I called The Lean Startup.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Gatekeepers are overloaded. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

The idea was to keep customers coming back to General Motors over time to upgrade to a better brand as they became wealthier. Finally, GM created the notion of perpetual demand within brands by continually obsoleting their own products yearly with new models rolled out every year. auto market with 60% of the U.S. car market.

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BeyondVC

MAY 5, 2004

This makes a ton of sense as the entrepreneur gets to understand a particular market and pain point for customers. In addition, the early stage business gets the customer to pay for its initial product development. Consequently, their product suffered and did not meet the demands of the wider market.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

LSC: Tell us about the customer development you did for your book: Alistair: We''ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders. LSC: What''s an example of one metric, other than revenue, that you might look at for a non-tech product? The Magic 8-Ball seldom says “Ask again later.” Everyone wanted some.

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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. You’ll learn a lot. Your investors may require something quite different.)

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Its an academic treatise that tries to answer a seemingly straightforward question: after World War II, why did Silicon Valley become the undisputed leader of the technology world, while Bostons Route 128 corridor did not. Worldwide developments based on this research led to modern radio communication, television, and the electronics age.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

The technical interview is at the heart of these challenges when building a product development team, and so I thought it deserved an entire post on its own. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. Were there to serve customers direclty, as well as all of the other functions of the company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Of their early customers, about 1/3 of them turned out to be high school or middle school teachers. This wasnt an education product - it was a pretty surprising group to find using it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

Its common to find a hacker at the heart of almost any successful technology company. As the company grows, hes the go-to person for almost everything technical, and so hes very much in demand. A really good technology executive can notice problems like the ones Im talking about today and address them proactively.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

For example, should we invest a week of engineering time into making our website more failure-proof (which were pretty sure will pay off right away) or into experimenting with a new technology (that might pay off in months, years, or never)? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

At some point in my career as I began to formulate thoughts about mission and intent , I started to think about the broader role of marketing in a growing technology company. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough.

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maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

what are the most crucial steps to be taken by a new tech startup when outsourcing major part of the tech to IT firms or outsourcing “product development” eg new social media website project? I think it’s a huge mistake to outsource technology as a startup. A few nuggets. 1) Hire A’s. A’s hire B’s, B’s hire C’s.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever. "Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?" How many things on this list require technology? Minimum means *minimum*.

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Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

link] tenthings most business-grads are too arrogant to realize that they are selling technology, not hot air, so they need a tech team to build upon, not a product. Your technology is really cool and working great but no one knows you exist. The business guys only started coming in after the core technology had been built out.

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

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. Thus, these pages.

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Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

You can argue that the DNA created by Microsoft's over emphasis on distribution (Steve) and development (Bill), has ultimately cost it $50bn or more in lost revenue, market share and market capitalization. Developers have worn the crown for the last 30 or more years in the technology industry - rightly.

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Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Every startup faces multiple choices and decisions when it comes to technology. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Ad Serving Technology. on demand billing and fraud management. Great for visualizing work of product development. Technology & Marketing Law Blog. Codeacademy.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Wed train them on-demand as they came in, and send them into the world (or onto the phones) with written instructions and voter contact data. What I found particularly interesting, looking back, is that the McCain campaign had superior technology, voter lists, and numbers on their side. What is customer development?

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