Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left his office or before a meeting ended. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 302

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

Technology 139

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development.

Customer Development 220

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 220

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 150

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice.

Silicon Valley 232

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 232

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. steve Customer Development is Hard. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The slides are here.

Customer Development 142

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 142

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

New strategic direction in companies with loyal customers have different consequences then when you had no customers Acquiring new customers are a lot more expensive that converting existing ones. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

Customer 201

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 185

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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. Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference? Sounds like handspring.

Customer Development 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

the “schedule fantasy factor,”) or his eleven rules of supercomputer design but also a real appreciation for how a technical visionary thinks. (I Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I would learn a ton from Gordon for over a decade, not only about practical heuristics for managing complex engineering projects (i.e. Now In Print!

North Carolina 126

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126

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.

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. Families gather from across the country to spend time with each other and feast on a traditional turkey dinner. Our friends who run the state park surrounding our ranch will join all of us for Thanksgiving dinner.

Silicon Valley 140

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.

Silicon Valley 223

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. The Adventure of a Lifetime. This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile.

Cofounder 223

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 223

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. He showed me a little Korean hard drive portable music player, not much more than the Compaq reference design it was based off of. It was fun watching it happen. com Michael Robertson.

Video 168

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. For example, complex new semiconductor architectures, (i.e. Now In Print!

Vertical 147

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

We talked about some simple design rules and I remember him thanking me for coming, saying we were the only chip company who cared enough to call on him (little did he know.) Long gone from Zilog I saw the picture of the original Macintosh design team. I thought nothing about the meeting until years later.

Silicon Valley 133

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf. From grumbling skeptics, they all became packaging design converts. And for sure they were never going to win any design awards. We were on the bottom row – with an invisible box. We labeled this our “Black Hole of Packaging&# strategy.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

I distinctly remember this is the first time I head the phrases “features and benefits.&# And since I saw our ads (but didn’t quite understand them,) I knew marketing was the group that designed them, somehow to get customers to think our products were better than Intel and Motorola’s. I also knew our customers.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 263

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Next, we needed to focus our messages away from technology and onto what the customers told us they needed – performance solutions for four key publishing applications. Our company’s graphics boards were designed to speed up a key part of the Macintosh graphics operating system called QuickDraw. Very much in addition to the text.

Silicon Valley 144

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 144

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. A-12 OXCART CIA Spyplane ESL found other ways to stay very close to its customers. could design and produce, and a good part of it was coming from Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley 176

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential? To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Facts are the rock on which you build your strategy and tactics In a startup second-hand facts are almost as useless as opinions. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 136

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford designed Klystrons producing 2½ Megawatts were manufactured by Varian and Litton would power the radar in the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) built at the height of the cold war.) Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 144

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Someone from your company has to be designated the official competitive intelligence officer for this show. Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. One of them is a loser. It isn’t going to be your booth. What didn’t? Go to trade shows like it matters.

Silicon Valley 129

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.”

Customer Development 280

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

So they systematically designed electronic devices called “jammers&# to shut down each part of the German air defense system. The German air defense system had 100′s of early warning radars, and thousands of radar controlled anti-aircraft guns, and Ground Controlled Intercept radars to guide the fighters into the bombers.

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 185

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? Platform selection and technical design - if your business strategy is to create a low-burn, highly iterative lean startup, youd better be using foundational tools that make that easy rather than hard.

CTO 168

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 21, 2010

Filed under: Customer Development « Requiem For A Roommate 2 Responses steve , on October 21, 2010 at 7:05 am Said: what did Carl say at 1:12 ? Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Here’s a 6 minute excerpt from the talk. the video skipped or something? To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 143

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Nuclear Weapons Laboratories used supercomputers to run their hydrodynamics codes for nuclear weapon design and the National Security Agency used them to decrypt codes. I had the only farm capable of nuclear weapons design. Cray called two years ago and bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one.

Silicon Valley 191

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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.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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. (You can use static methods like Monte Carlo simulation, or dynamic methods using continuous or discrete simulation.) However, for the Web 2.0

Vertical 130

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 130

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

Customer Development This strategy of starting on faith, and quickly turning them into facts is the core of the Customer Development process. Employ customer development. One of the key tenets of entrepreneurship is that you start your company with insufficient resources and knowledge. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 219

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Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2009

Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I can’t get this one out of my head. ———— The VENONA Project One of the most interesting (declassified) stories of cryptography is the deciphering of Soviet communications to their diplomatic missions in the U.S during World War II. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

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