Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, July 29, 2009 Embrace technical debt Financial debt plays an important and positive role in our economy under normal conditions. Technical debt works the same way, and has the same perils. I won’t pretend that there aren’t teams that take on technical debt for bad reasons.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Enter “ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses “, a New York Times bestseller by founder of IMVU (creator of 3D avatars) Eric Ries. Not doing so would end up in wasteful innovations and features that customers do not want.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

When it comes to being an entrepreneur, establishing a personal brand through a website is critical to success. If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. Here’s the entrepreneur’s guide to getting your first website off the ground.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

In the real world a big pivot in life sciences far down the road of development is a very bad sign due to huge sunk costs. Other pivots involved moving from a platform technology to become a product supplier, moving from a therapeutic drug to a diagnostic or moving from a device that required a PMA to one that required a 510(k).

SBIR 319

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 319

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

. — Teaching students to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. We wanted to teach our students how to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. These two startups had problems they could not solve on their own due to lack of resources—time, people, money. Hawken students practicing Customer Discovery in a mall.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review. Most entrepreneurs today don’t remember the Dot-Com bubble of 1995 or the Dot-Com crash that followed in 2000. Then the cycle repeats with a new set of technologies. They needed to be sure that what they were building was what customers wanted and needed.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

In 2007, I graduated United States Air Force Academy as a computer engineer and entered the Air Force’s acquisition corps , excited and confident about my ability to bring technology to bear for our airmen. I was their technical man on the inside – making sure big defense contractors delivered on their promises.

Lean 268

Lean Technical Review Acquisition Software Review 268

The Equity Kicker

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

Two developments have changed the face of startup investing in the UK in recent years. The first development is increased capital efficiency. Entrepreneurs can now achieve an awful lot with very little money. The second development is SEIS and EIS. It went up on their blog yesterday. _.

Early Stage 119

Early Stage Development Team Review Technical Review Software Review 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? Often times, it seems like people are thinking its synonymous with "that guy who gets paid to sit in the corner and think technical deep thoughts" or "that guy who gets to swoop in a rearrange my project at the last minute on a whim." But along the way, something strange happened.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

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.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? This would seem to be a fatal stake through the heart of the class.

Lean 413

Lean Security Asia SBIR 413

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 2, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, June 2, 2010 The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business Review) I continue my series for Harvard Business Review with the Lean Startup technique called Five Whys. Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable Beware of Vanity Metrics For Startups, How Much Process Is Too Much?

Technical Review 132

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 132

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. 50% the fault of a Nokia management that didn’t see it coming, while 50% was due to brilliant Apple execution.) Ultimately, Nokia’s difficulties will turn out to be good news for Finnish entrepreneurs.

Finland 331

Finland Naming Russia Government 331

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 267

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

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. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Summer is always the time when large numbers of new participants in the tech ecosystem arrive and start to get their bearings. It’s also surprisingly difficult for students to get plugged-in to everything that is happening in the local tech ecosystem. Greenhorn Connect: Excellent collection of BOS tech events and resources.

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 8, 2010

We’re here for Greycroft’s CEO Summit – a gathering of the CEO’s of their portfolio companies with guest speakers covering topics including how to build your team, PR, customer development, etc. It is the key to “customer development” that Steve Blank talks about. I’m going to save that for a future blog post.

PR 279

PR Technical Review Portfolio Customer Development 279

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

VCs tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most are using the same infrastructure tools they have used for the past 20+ years: Excel and recent college grads searching Google. According to Knowledge.VC , under 5% of US VCs have a full-time team member focused on technology. . But we’re doing it slowly.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

The Next Web

JUNE 8, 2014

Developing an enterprise-grade SaaS product is not easy. The keys are maintaining capital efficiency, launching early versions to the SMB market and constantly applying customer development methods. Design & Dev Entrepreneur Analysis and Opinion' Yoav Leitersdorf and Ofer Schreiber of are partners at YL Ventures.

B2C 132

B2C B2B IP Technical Review 132

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

Over time, innovations outside the company (demographic, cultural, new technologies, etc.) The company loses customers, then revenues and profits decline and it eventually gets acquired or goes out of business. If you’re an entrepreneur, you spend your time worrying about how to get out of the box on the left and move to the right.

Search 249

Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 249

Hearpreneur

JULY 30, 2016

Female entrepreneurs and business owners are no longer taken with a grain of salt. Female entrepreneurs continue to make strides in business despite the pay gap, discrimination, and gender politics which play out on both large and small stages. In 2015, businesses owned by women brought in more than $1.5 trillion in sales.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Technical Cofounder Entrepreneur CTO Hire 48

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2015

Successful entrepreneurs show up a lot and make their own luck. Both of these traits made all the difference for the two latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. The) first thing was I wanted to be a land developer because I wanted to be my own builder. Phil Randazzo.

Las Vegas 120

Las Vegas Entrepreneur Cofounder Nevada 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

The assets were a series of products already developed and on the market or in the development pipeline. When I went through their financials as part of my due diligence I realized that if they ditched their low margin disk drive products, it wouldn’t take much to make them a profitable company.

Silicon Valley 165

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 165

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) This mantra of talking to customers and iterating the product is the basis of the Lean Startup Methodology that Eric Ries has been evangelizing and I’ve been teaching at U.C. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 204

crowdSPRING Blog

JUNE 6, 2014

The embedded presentation above is filled with valuable data on the state of the Internet and trends in technology around the world. How to Outsource without the Headache | by Frank Gruber in Tech Cocktail – crowdspring.co/1hyLg7A. Customer] Retention is King (good insights on measurement) – crowdspring.co/1haiyJt.

Social Media 94

Social Media Small Business Design Software Review 94

The Next Web

MAY 4, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. One of the last entrepreneurs I met on a funding trip, ended up raising a $6M round in Italy. Previously, he worked in venture capital in Europe. But don’t expect to go back with a check.

San Francisco 159

San Francisco Europe Technical Review Due Diligence 159

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. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Are These Your Slides?

Silicon Valley 253

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 That died with waterfall software development. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Usually in a tech / software startup 70-80% of your costs will be people.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Joel said it: "Top notch development teams dont torture their programmers."

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

Freshman Salesman writes: I’ve read somewhere in your blog about how you had a very large organisation as the first customer for your software. I’m putting myself in the same boat now with the solution I’m developing so could you tell me: 1. How did you reach out to your first customer? I think you meant this

Customer 231

Customer Software Review IP Technical Review 231

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 9, 2013

Besides the loss of potential future revenue, any sunk costs (costs you initially incur to gain the customer) are unrecoverable. If you lose a customer due to price or other circumstances beyond your control, then fine. However, losing a customer because he or she felt unappreciated or underserved is inexcusable.

Customer 170

Customer Technical Review Florida Cofounder 170

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 11, 2011

To give a little context, I asked two of the other judges - Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits (co-authors of the excellent Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development ) - to add a bit of commentary. Great use of airbnb for their source of customer development won them 'Best #CustDev Award."

New York City 161

New York City New York Lean SMS 161

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

In 2006, as a new employee of the Fortune 100 provider of wireless technology and services, San Diego’s Qualcomm , I volunteered to salvage a fledging idea management system (fancy term for an online suggestion box) by turning into a comprehensive corporate entrepreneurship program. ———-. The origin. Qualcomm Venture Fest.

Programming 298

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 298

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. Anyway, let’s dive into this topic more, starting with technical debt.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

In 2006, as a new employee of the Fortune 100 provider of wireless technology and services, San Diego’s Qualcomm , I volunteered to salvage a fledging idea management system (fancy term for an online suggestion box) by turning into a comprehensive corporate entrepreneurship program. ———-. The origin. Qualcomm Venture Fest.

Programming 290

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 290