Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Jeff Katzenberg has a great track record – head of the studio at Paramount, chairman of Disney Studios, co-founder of DreamWorks and now chairman of NewTV. Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

In the end the revenue simply wasn’t enough to make a sustainable business and so we had to switch gears once more (in today’s parlance that would be a “Pivot”). Over the course of that relationship that lasted several years, we did over $1M in revenue just from HP. We found a customer whom we knew had the resources to pay.

Revenue 72

Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

We realized that past K-12 Entrepreneurial classes taught students “the lemonade stand” version of how to start a company: 1) come up with an idea, 2) execute the idea, 3) do the accounting (revenue, costs, etc.). These two startups served as the students’ introduction to customer development methodology.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 This was valuable to startups in the Valley and has been vital to startups in regions where the ecosystem is less developed. The Bend Experience.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us?

Customer Development 230

Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Finally, when everyone else had their turn, the grey-haired VC turned to the founder and said, “If you do what we tell you to do and fail, we’ll fire you. The Customer Development model that I write and teach about is the entrepreneur’s version of Boyds’ OODA loop.). But at least you’d be executing your plan not ours.

Business Model 332

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 332

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2011

The Startup Genome Compass uses a hybrid “Stage and Type&# model that describes how startups progress through their business development lifecycle. 93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold. Startups that scale properly grow about 20 times faster than startups that scale prematurely.

Software Review 292

Software Review Early Stage Technical Review Startup 292

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.

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

As seed rounds have atomized, it’s not uncommon for founders to raise 3 or even 4 rounds prior to a series A. The reality is that if a founder raised every one of these rounds, and lead investors always got their “target” ownership, the level of dilution would be ridiculous. Founders with limited experience. should be avoided.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

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 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. It Seems Logical.

Part-Time VPE 318

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 318

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development. While it sounds simple , the Build Measure Learn approach to product development is a radical improvement over the traditional Waterfall model used throughout the 20 th century to build and ship products.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

The company loses customers, then revenues and profits decline and it eventually gets acquired or goes out of business. If you’ve been reading my book on Customer Development and follow my work on Market Type , this type of innovation is best for adding new products to existing markets. Creative Destruction.

Search 242

Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 242

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 9, 2013

It was a lifelong lesson that taught me to never start a business where you hate your customers. You don’t want to do Customer Development with them. So you and your team need to feel comfortable being in this business with these customers. It never goes well. You don’t want to talk to them.

Cofounder 325

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Liquidity Event Lean 325

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. If not your co-founders, someone outside the company.”.

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. You would think that would be enough to get wrong, but entrepreneurs and investors compound this problem by assuming that all startups grow and scale by executing the Revenue Plan.

Revenue 230

Revenue Balance Sheet Hockey Stick Burn Rate 230

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. Company branding builds trust and an emotional connection between businesses and potential customers. Custom development. But establishing a website isn’t easy. There are countless places to start.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Lean 333

Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

The Founder’s New Insight Smart founders are never satisfied with simply executing their current business model, they are constantly observing, orienting and deciding whether their current business model can be made better. But the purpose of this post is what happens when a founder (or large company CEO) finds a better business model.

Customer 195

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

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.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. With a little help from a friend, you can handle expenses, revenue, and payroll, with QuickBooks or a similar package.

Cost 405

Cost Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media 405

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

Talking to customers seems like a simple idea, but most founders find it’s one of the hardest things they have to do. Founders innately believe they understand a customers problem and just need to spend their time building a solution. You can test your hypotheses with a series of experiments with potential customers.

Customer 413

Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2010

But startups can shoot themselves in the foot when founders use consultants at the wrong time or in the wrong way. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. After a bit more discussion, I discovered the “problem in getting traction” meant revenue was zero. Consultants Don’t Pivot, Founders Do. Here’s why.

Founder 199

Founder Cofounder Business Model Customer Development 199

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

So if you’re the founder of a startup, you may want to consider who you take money from. Is Your VC Founder Friendly? Do they “get&# Customer Development ? How many of their founders are still with their company? How many of their founders are still with their company? Do They Get Customer Development?

Founder 231

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 231

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 31, 2011

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany." The Startup Genome Compass uses a hybrid "Stage and Type" model that describes how startups progress through their business development lifecycle.

Software Review 134

Software Review Early Stage Startup Technical Review 134

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

At NextView we invest across the spectrum of seed stage companies so roughly 1/3rd of the companies we invest in are pre-product, roughly 1/3rd are post-product but pre-revenue, and perhaps 1/3rd have some very early revenue. You’re obviously not showing charts of user growth, number of customers, or revenue.

Seed Stage 149

Seed Stage B2B Seed Capital Revenue 149

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need. The “I know what features to build” flaw.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

The Equity Kicker

JUNE 17, 2014

Henrik Werdelin, co-founder of Barkbox a subscription ecommerce service for dog owners wrote a great post on Medium detailing The 6 counterintuitive ways Barkbox grew to a 100m business. Each of these is about understanding and respecting the customer. In other words, the key to getting 100m revenue was customer focus.

Revenue 102

Revenue Customer Social Media Cofounder 102

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. Each industry in a region should develop a playbook that expands and details the strategy and tactics of how to build a scalable startup.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Market Risk vs. 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 invention risk.

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

While the Ministry would be glad to help develop the next Facebook or Google, the initial first step is more reasonable — get startups to breakeven or better while employing 15, 20, or more Colombians. Amazingly by the end of the program’s eighth week, 8 of the 25 teams had customer revenue.

Colombia 321

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 321