Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. VCs and Angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). Chief Brand Officer.

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CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Steve Blank

JANUARY 27, 2011

What’s A Startup? We’ve been teaching that the difference between a startup and an existing company is that existing companies execute business models, while startups search for a business model. (Or This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

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Business Model Utah Intellectual Property Agile 275

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups. Build a product, get it into the real world, measure customers’ reactions and behaviors, learn from this, and use what you’ve learned to build something better. Then came the Build-Measure-learn focus of the Lean Startup.

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Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. Instead we ended up with poorly written documents that looked like ransom notes.

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Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from? Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from? A startup is not executing a series of knowns.

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Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 312

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. What kind of objectives would a startup want or need for sales and marketing? For example, some startup sales execs believe hiring the core sales team is a key objective.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

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 242

Up and Running

MAY 18, 2016

Reading lists are dime a dozen, but reading lists that focus on rapid-growth startup businesses? It’s the ultimate startup guide if you’re looking for systematic business growth and guidance on what not to do. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

You think startups are hard? What you’re holding in your hand is a revolutionary document. A smaller number of companies have become proficient at the next step— incubation —rigorously testing new business concepts, using the lean start-up methods of Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and Business Model design.

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Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Once upon a time every great organization was a scrappy startup willing to take risks – new ideas, new methods, new customers, targets, and mission. Product people are often messy, hate paperwork and prefer to spend their time creating stuff rather than documenting it. Companies Run on Process.

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice. The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. That died with waterfall software development.

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Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. VCs and Angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. Image via Wikimedia Commons. Chief Brand Officer.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2014

This post follows directly on Steve’s earlier excellent post, Why Companies are not Startups. In this post, I want to share some new thoughts that build on Steve’s post, and connect them to Lean Startup methods. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a repeatable, scalable business model.

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Startup Business Model Lean Russia 327

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

This is part of my ongoing posts on Startup Advice. As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers. But even with this in mind we churned out products that were too complex or didn’t meet customer expectations. Turn Your Organization Inside Out. It was humbling.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

These don’t require coding skills—they’re usually visual templates that are easy to use but don’t allow for great customization (that would require technical skills). Custom development. This means hiring/contracting a freelance web developer or an agency to design and develop your site from start to finish.

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Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Whether it’s managing your supply chain or automating customer service, look for ways to optimise every aspect of your operations. PDF to Word conversion tools can be a lifesaver for managing documents efficiently. They allow you to easily edit, share, and collaborate on documents without the need for multiple software solutions.

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Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 133

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

My first company launched in 1999 and we were offering a SaaS document management in the cloud (we were called ASPs back then). I didn’t have first-hand experience in document management systems other than as a user and nobody had SaaS experience – the market was too new. I’ll always point out when I am.).

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San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Startups that are searching for a business model need to keep score differently than large companies that are executing a known business model. Yet most entrepreneurs and their VC’s make startups use financial models and spreadsheets that actually hinder their success. Here’s why. Managing the Business.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

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Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 320

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 6, 2009 Lean Startup fbFund slides and video As a follow-up to my previous post on my talk for fbFund at Facebook , there was enough interest in watching video of the talk that I have finally uploaded it using Apples MobileMe. If you want to see the original video, use the link above.

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Lean Video San Francisco Continuous Deployment 115

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 11, 2015

A startup is not a part-time activity. Trying to do a startup while keeping your day job may doom you to failure. So will failing to understand your customers. Mandela Schumacher-Hodge , founder of The Startup Couch , which aims to help founders stay happy and healthy as they change the world. We were early to the market.

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Cofounder India Entrepreneur Maryland 120

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 13, 2011

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. 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."

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Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, July 3, 2009 Lean Startup fbFund wrap-up Last week I had a real blast meeting with the companies at the fbFund incubator at Palo Alto. The Lean Startup fbFund Edition View more documents from Eric Ries. We tend to equate startup success with making money, but that is a poor choice.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The business plan is a wonderful document for organizing and planning for existing companies to launch follow-on products. In an existing corporation, the business plan is the execution document for sustaining innovation. But for startups, business plans fail to match the chaotic reality they encounter in the real world.

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Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 263

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume. Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Expo Intensive rocked, the mainstream media has started writing about the Lean Startup, and - most of all - the movement continues to grow and evolve. First of all, the Startup Lessons Learned conference exceeded my wildest expectations. He inspired me to take a deeper look at what we all thought we understood about startups.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

Startups are companies. Startups aspire to become big companies. Therefore, startups should have departments. Each of these benefits also exists in startups, which is why most startups are also organized in departments. I once worked at a startup with an exceptional functional department system.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 2, 2010

The gist of the talk was to observe that: startups are not smaller versions of large companies. startups search for a business model, large companies execute an existing one. the skills that talented product managers bring to a large company are at best not transferable to a startup (and at worst destructive).

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Silicon Valley Management San Francisco Product 261

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company Ive even heard about. In many startup situations, ask yourself "Do I really need to accurately know when this project will be done?" The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Startup 2 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and we are going to offer a lower-cost, web-based version. Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture. None of mine did.)

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

ConversionXL

JANUARY 31, 2014

note: If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use customer development questions for your page to resonate with future traffic). Do This: Use customer development techniques found in this post to build a profile of your ideal buyer personas. What are you using our product for? image source. image source.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 4, 2012

In each case, the business plans were big, long, serious documents that had only a minor semblance to actual business that got created. Today, it’s clear to me that business plans for startup companies are a historical artifact that represented the best approach at the time to define a business for potential investors.

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Business Plan Lean Cofounder Venture Capital 193

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

How about documentation that nobody reads? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Startup Lessons Learned - the Conference (April 23.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 142

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

In the past both hardware and software were engineered using Waterfall development, a process that moves through new product development one-step-at-a-time. Marketing delivers a “requirements” document to engineering. Then engineering develops a functional specification and designs the product.

Continuous Deployment 329

Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 329

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I started as a guest lecturer, essentially walk-on entertainment, where the minimal entry was proving that I could form complete sentences and tell engaging stories from my eight startups that illustrated key lessons in entrepreneurship. While Jerry and John built a great process, they didn’t document it. He was right.

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