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 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

We think teaching teams a formal methodology around the Lean Framework (Business Model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) is a natural evolution of how successful incubators/accelerators will build startups. Technology in search of a market. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders.

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conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses. Website Analysis.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

crowdSPRING Blog

JUNE 6, 2014

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! The embedded presentation above is filled with valuable data on the state of the Internet and trends in technology around the world. Customer Development 101) – crowdspring.co/1pNIOcD.

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Social Media Small Business Design Software Review 94

Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

Over the last two and a half years the National Science Foundation I-Corps has taught over 300 teams of scientists how to commercialize their technology and how to fail less, increasing their odds for commercial success. assess intellectual property and regulatory risk before they design and build. They cannot be done by proxies.

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Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 274

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

So in 2011, with support from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (the entrepreneurship center in the Stanford Engineering School), we created a new capstone entrepreneurship class – the Lean LaunchPad. When we started this class, the concept of Lean (business models, customer development, agile, pivots, mvp’s) was new to everyone.

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Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 254

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf.

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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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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers. VP of Sales – “Sure.”

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Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 251

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley. Bill Gross founded Idealab in 1996, making it the longest-running technology incubator alive today. He’ll talk about making a profit and making a difference in a conversation with New Media Ventures’ Christie George.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

We’re standing 15 air miles away from the epicenter of technology innovation. I’ve been asked to talk today about the future of Innovation – typically that involves giving you a list of hot technologies to pay attention to – technologies like machine learning. In fact, it’s not about any specific new technologies.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010

It’s a paradox, but early sales success in a startup can kill its chances of becoming a large successful company. The cause is often sales and marketing execs who’ve become too comfortable with an initial sales model and panic at the first sign of a Pivot. And this time sales revolted. What could go wrong?

Silicon Valley 243

Silicon Valley Technical Review Spain Engineer 243

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. Your product is designed with natural tripwires to trigger other pricing ( Freemium model ), or not (business model left as an exercise to your future self). simple enough to be self-service).

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Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

Big brands have the advantage of a strong reputation and a crew of professional designers behind their sites. If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. When it comes to making money online, business and personal branding are huge drivers of sales and influence.

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Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

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 253

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. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 228

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 2, 2024

Focusing on Your Sales Funnel With a Ph.D. Sadly, the corporate landscape is littered with downed players who fell flat as the result of nothing so much as missed opportunity. “As technology advances and consumer demand evolves, companies and products quickly can be left behind,” Truong cautioned. As Truong wrote in a Sept.

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North America Artificial Inteligence America Valuation 104

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. Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. Back then it seemed foreign.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

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. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog produced one of the first 8-bit microprocessors , the Z-80 (competing at the time with Intel’s 8080 , Motorola 6800, and MOS Technology 6502.) I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000.

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Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 200

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.)

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North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 131

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies, Intel and Digital Equipment, names that at that time carried a lot of weight. Motioning to our VP of Sales, he ordered: “Go with him and get him in front of customers, and both of you don’t come back until you can tell us something we don’t know.”

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Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 283

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. It starts at ~40:30 in the video.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 154

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 10, 2024

Salesforce, renowned for its robust customer relationship management (CRM) platform, serves as the nerve center for many businesses’ sales, marketing, and customer service operations. Why does Salesforce SMS integration matter?

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SMS Customer Campaign Social Media 137

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Designing Your Business Model Crafting a business model is like building a blueprint for your venture. Then, consider how you’ll reach your customers and what kind of relationship you want to build with them. Will you opt for direct sales, subscriptions, or a freemium model?

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Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 144

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 19, 2017

In e-commerce, retaining customers is essential to the survival of your business. It has long been known that keeping a customer is much cheaper than acquiring a new one, as those customers tend to be far more receptive to sales and promotions after they have made an initial purchase with you. Engage your customers.

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Software Review Technical Review Retention Channel 133

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

We hired a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Duke who had worked on helicopter design. They knew the technology trendsetters in their fields and got us in front of them. In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one. Blog at WordPress.com.

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 221

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Your results may vary.

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

Another critical design consideration is your tech stack. HOF Capital has stitched together our workflow across Google Suite , Slack , Airtable , Asana , Copper , and some other tools (leveraging Zapier for basic 3rd party integration, in addition to custom development for certain other integrations).

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Technical Review Private Equity Management Cap Table 60

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2018

Another critical design consideration is your tech stack. HOF Capital has stitched together our workflow across Google Suite , Slack , Airtable , Asana , Copper , and some other tools (leveraging Zapier for basic 3rd party integration, in addition to custom development for certain other integrations).

Technical Review 60

Technical Review Private Equity Management Cap Table 60

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

I put together a one-page website, a list of 100 people to reach out to, and a cold email script that would make seasoned sales professionals cringe. I know this language sounds formal and stuffy, but high-ticket service sales cycles are long. Interviewing your customers can reveal the priorities they’re aware of.

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

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. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

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Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

We knew from back-of-the-envelope calculations that I would need 3 times the combined marketing and sales budgets of the incumbents for a head-on assault. (I We had been attempting to compete by their rules with the same types of technology messages. If we tried to match them on their playing field we’d never catch up.

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Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. 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.) I thought nothing about the meeting until years later. What happened?

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. Each VC firm/partner has a different spin on what to weigh more.)

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.” Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product.

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