Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 31, 2015

Every year, our team conducts more than 500 customer development calls to understand what challenges the community is facing. Dun & Bradstreet, a 174 year old financial services company, has spent the last year building an experiment-driven marketing operation. Here are some of our favorites: 1.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Venture Capitalists on your board developed the expertise to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits.

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2013

The microcode is distributed by 1) Intel or by 2) Microsoft integrated into a BIOS or 3) as part of a Windows update. You’d be invisible to all rootkit detection techniques that checks the operating system. Your operating system ensures security of updates by checking downloaded update packages against the signing key.)

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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.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 26, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter : Customer Discovery in Digital Health.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

These new entrants disrupted their food categories by offering high quality proprietary recipes, outsourcing their manufacturing, and using their cash and resources on sales and marketing to build distribution and a differentiated brand. And not just any customer; it was from one of the largest supermarket chains in the U.S.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Agile software development. Customer development. What is customer development?

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

While individual VC’s inside venture firms specialized in particular domains (PC’s, peripherals, semiconductors, test equipment, operating systems, applications, etc.,) But these VC’s aren’t Lean because they fund startups with web-based distribution models. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Does legal need to sign off for cyber operations?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups built every possible feature the founding team envisioned (using “Waterfall development,”) into a monolithic “release” of the product taking months or years to build a first product release. There was no repeatable methodology, startups and their VC’s still operated like startups were simply a smaller version of a large company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

In management jobs related to operations – that is, the people tasked with actually making and distributing physical products – this kind of thinking is now considered ludicrous, thanks to a century of progress. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Dog Patch Labs – Shared workspace operated by Polaris Ventures. Gridco Systems – Power Distribution Systems (backed by General Catalyst and Northbridge). Coworking Spaces and Accelerators.

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Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.

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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.

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YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 5, 2016

By Jay DesMarteau, head of small business and government banking distribution for TD Bank. The holiday season has begun, and small business owners in the retail and hospitality industries are operating in what is often their busiest time of year.

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The Equity Kicker

JULY 29, 2013

Here at Forward we look for great products with a compelling customer value proposition (a compelling value proposition is one where the customer benefits are significantly greater than the cost). If the product is great and the value proposition strong distribution problems can be solved. The reverse is rarely true.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Compared to the million-dollar startup, they are operating at micro-scale. Instead, each potential customer has to go through a self-serve process of signing up and paying money. Because they have no presence in the market, they have to find distribution channels to bring in customers. How does that stack up?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Some of the conversations went like this: Startup 1 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and have been following the Customer Development process and I’ve talked to lots of customers.” Do you know have they distribute their product? Do you know the archetype of their customers? This is easy to test.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

LSC: Tell us about the customer development you did for your book: Alistair: We''ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders. As operators of an accelerator—and founders in our own right—Ben and I had constantly struggled with what the “right” numbers are for a business. That''s changing, slowly.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2015

First up in our speaker spotlight series is an edited transcript of our Q&A with Rocio Perez-Ochoa , co-founder of Bidhaa Sasa , a non-profit working to distribute beneficial goods to rural communities in Kenya. Fix the distribution bottleneck in rural Kenya. “My The inspiration for Bidhaa Sasa? Don’t get into a “startup mindset.”

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Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

GoTo.com went on to ink huge distribution deals with Microsoft, AOL & Yahoo! Secondly, they had an owned & operated (O&O) website – Google.com – and Overture had shut down GoTo.com at the request of their very profitable and large distribution partners. – the biggest Internet portals of the day.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

How do they connect with a new generation of customers who had no brand loyalty? How to they use the new distribution channels competitors have adopted? How do they make these transitions without alienating and losing their existing customers, distribution channels and partners?

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news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

What would have happened if, before Netflix had become established, one of the major rental store chains or perhaps a coalition of big movie studios had realised the potential of those new distribution models and the danger to the existing happy cash generators, and consequently thrown $100,000,000 into getting their own service off the ground?

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 8, 2019

The large organizations used startups who could rapidly build and deliver products for them – by offering something the startups needed – contracts, a distribution platform, or prizes. The risk here is that copying innovation without understanding the customer problem/mission can result in solutions that miss the target.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

If you’re working closely with partners who are helping you distribute your product, it’s especially important to make sure they understand who you are, how you speak, and who you serve. You get to call all the shots, including how you want to operate the business and who you want to be involved. On the other hand, it’s a slow process.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Even the most radical Bell Curve -style thinkers have to concede that even if there are differences between men and women in the distribution of these traits on average, these curve have substantial overlap, and there should still be a lot more of them represented in high-tech startups. This is especially important across functional lines.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 7, 2016

You have a decent IQ and then you have to be able to operate in extreme environments for extended periods of time. … Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. It’s a perfect … training ground for an entrepreneur. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

The class was unique in that it was 1) team-based, 2) experiential, 3) lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). When we started this class, the concept of Lean (business models, customer development, agile, pivots, mvp’s) was new to everyone. Class Velocity/Depth.

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ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

If you don’t have customers, our articles on customer development and how to write compelling copy without customers can help you get started. It comes down to understanding how the channel actually operates—not how you’d like it to operate. This post contains video, click to play].

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

A given customer would have an entity URL that looked like this: customer://1234 Somewhere in your API, you have a way to access data about a given customer. Im not talking about high-level abstractions (like an object-oriented view of a customers data). Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation.

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ConversionXL

MAY 22, 2014

If you don’t have customers, our articles on customer development & writing compelling copy when you don’t have any customers , to help you to start getting people to buy. Recommended Reading: It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem.

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techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business. I’m taking a 52 week course in how to start up, run, operate, and achieve self employment.

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www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

I have come to believe during my time as an operator, entrepreneur and investor that the balance of these skills is so important to the long-term health of a business that if balance is not achieved early then the impact later can be profound - sometimes terminal. Satyajit Sahu • Jan 9, 2011 Excellent categorization.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2009

For most of its existence, PHP didnt have a standard package-distribution system or very good module support. Although this was annoying for sysadmins, security consultants, and language purists (and for those who had proprietary modules that couldnt be bundled), it was a huge boon for developers.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. free, distributed source code control management system. In addition, TheFunded.com allows entrepreneurs to view and share term sheets, to assist one other finding good investor, and to discuss the many facets of operating a business. Customer Development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

It took hundreds of years for newspapers to learn to behave as worthy holders of this public trust and cover the news without fear or favour, and create a firewall between news and views and the ad-sales side of the operation. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much.

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