Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features. I used to always tell my development team, “you need to design a product that my dad could use.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. ESL, the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley , was founded by a PhD in Math and six other scientists and engineers. It might be its most important. ———-. Cold War Spin Outs.

Engineer 311

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 311

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? Here’s an attempt to put this all in context.

Search 324

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 324

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk.

Vertical 162

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 162

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. I had been teaching Z8000 design to customers for the last year and a half. I also knew our customers. I understand how our products were being used and why we won design-in’s over Intel or Motorola.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Second, the leaders of these companies tended to be those who excelled at finance, supply chain or production. ARM, a competitor, not only had a better, much lower power processor, but a better business model – they licensed their architecture to other companies that designed their own products. But it’s not over for Intel.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

There is a wealth of resources that are unique to this town and a vibrant community of hackers, product designers, business people, and investors at various stages in their career. This guide is designed to help you hit the ground running and is a starting point for your entrepreneurial journey in Boston. Ruby specialists.

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress. a language corporate innovation groups can use to communicate to business units and finance. Entrepreneurs should always communicate their business’ very latest stage of customer development as part of their investor presentation.

Sacramento 312

Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 312

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

In Customer Development the goal of a minimum feature set is to pare the features of the first product release to the minimum necessary for early customers. The finance system didn’t talk to the sales system which didn’t know the manufacturing system even existed. All the Data and Not a Drop to Think.

San Francisco 230

San Francisco Database Advisory Board Silicon Valley 230

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. If you never have, you can create your own using Google Finance. All very reasonable, well designed, well argued.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

One would think that designing a medical device would be a simple engineering problem, and startups would be emerging right and left. Recently, the financing of innovation in medical devices has collapsed even further with most Class III devices simply unfundable. Life Sciences II – Medical Devices. Regulatory Issues.

Startup 300

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 300

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship , an introduction to building a scalable startup. Accounting Basics and Multi-stage Finance. Yet every team did figure out how to conduct extensive out of building Customer Discovery. (By

Intellectual Property 257

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 257

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.) ——————– Engineering 245.

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. Labels: agile , customer development 15comments: Scott Shapiro said.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

. — I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” They accomplished their goal, but at a huge, unanticipated cost: the processes and committees they designed ended up strangling innovation. Engineering continually felt overwhelmed.

Incubator 317

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 317

www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

In another example, at GroupSpaces we use services from Recurly to power our subscription billing engine and Assistly to power our helpdesk, which helped us to get up and running within a day. Please design a logo for me. ?With Rob Carter on finance. Design by Scheybeler+company. Development by Message and Adrian McShane.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Coder 43

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 6, 2014

This is a quote from Leander Kahney’s recently published book on Apple design chief Jony Ive: “In the world according to Steve Jobs, the ANPP would rapidly evolve into a well-defined process for bringing new products to market by laying out in extreme detail every stage of product development.

Product 84

Product Venture Capital Lean Finance 84

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2010

The first time I taught the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship class, a quarter of the class were foreign students in a special engineering-entrepreneurship program where they took one entrepreneurship class each quarter at Stanford while working full time in technology startups in Silicon Valley. There is no “right path” to success.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Business Model Customer Development Engineer 127

www.instigatorblog.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This is especially true when you think of a tech startup, where the first few hires are typically engineers/programmers. To make round numbers let's say you have 100,000 share outstanding and you give your lead engineer 1000. 1% is just not a lot. the better the startup will be. If we assume 5 year to a $100MM exit that's 250k.

Equity 41

Equity Employee Startup Vesting 41

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.

Vertical 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. Examples are Hollywood for movies, Milan for fashion, New York for finance and today, Silicon Valley for technology entrepreneurship. The previous post described how China built its science and technology infrastructure. – The Torch Program.

Programming 284

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 284

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

This week they broadened the discussion with interviews with the city planner in Mariposa, Texas and the city engineer from Rapid City, South Dakota. Include people, hardware, software, prototypes, financing, etc. We taught them theory, methodology, and practice using Customer Development and business model design.

South Dakota 232

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 232

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2016

Javier : … the entrepreneurial engine of the United States is bar none the most efficient wealth creation and job creation tool that has ever existed. … . She came to the GSA as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2013, where she worked on the development of MyUSA.gov. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Small Business Administration 120

Small Business Administration SBIR United States Entrepreneur 120

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

These days, to even get noticed, you need to be 100% on point with design, product, copy and marketing. With no money, how do you expect to have great design, engineering, copy, marketing, content marketing, customer service, operations, and everything else that comes along with running a successful startup.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

And a company culture and values need to be design and engineered just like the product. . Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey, Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Carolina Cofounder Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

This post is about the how the Chinese government engineered technology clusters. Examples are Hollywood for movies, Milan for fashion, New York for finance and today, Silicon Valley for technology entrepreneurship. The previous post described how China built its science and technology infrastructure. – The Torch Program.

Programming 176

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 176

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 21, 2010

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Startups are designed to confront situations of extreme uncertainty. A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Startup Lean Continuous Deployment 168

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

His quote on the subject, "no amount of finance will cure mismanagement". His friends at General Electric said he was wasting his time on the gas combustion engine because the world was going electric. -- ErrantX 215 days ago | link. The story of the v-8 engine is a bit different. From "Think and Grow Rich".

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Who better to answer than the company's engineering lead. The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. Finance, IT, Legal). This post is an accusation. call to arms.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

Users were not just an extension of the testing team - they were an extension of the product design team. When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day. We always assigned them a "code mentor" from the ranks of the more established engineers.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. You have your general management meeting and in your general management meeting you talk about product development, about marketing and about finance. Edwin: Would I be able to attract other people if the design would be different?

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

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. is just another engineering process, not building a business.

Lean 285

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 285

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Among those: plentiful financing and nerds , a culture that celebrates both failure and success, and an ethos of openness and sharing. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? ScienceDaily: Corporate culture is most important.

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

The Next Web

JANUARY 27, 2013

Amazed at all the beautifully designed products that came out of only 76 hours. Especially because I could have used this time on marketing, sales and customer development, and actually helped our business move forward. I was not very happy with my life, but didn’t really know why. I found this a real waste of time and energy.

Netherlands 159

Netherlands Technical Review Software Review Cofounder 159

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

I used a freelance web designer and I only created the core functions to create, send, and manage invoices. Further functions such as expense tracking, recurring invoicing, and quoting were on my development list but I waited with the implementation until I was able to prove that my customers were interested in these additions.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

If you’re looking for a designer, engineer, or biz marketing guy – go to meetups / conferences that those people would go to. With that live, you’ll be able to show other smart engineers and advisors that you’re willing to take some risk and build something. If you believe in it – then finance whatever you can yourself.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44