Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

In the early stages of a startup your hypotheses about all the parts of your business model are your profound beliefs. Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. I was a great marketer.

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Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world. Corporate elephants can dance.

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Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 222

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, science and engineering at both Stanford and U.C. Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. Over my career as a serial entrepreneur I observed that since the late 1990s, no early-stage Silicon Valley investor had used business plans to screen investments.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. The Adventure Begins.

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Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

The first time a few brave corporate innovators tried to overlay the Lean tools and techniques that work in early-stage startups in an existing corporation, the result was chaos, confusion, frustration and ultimately, failure. Lean is The Engine for the Ambidextrous Organization. Fast forward to today.

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Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

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

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. The same is true in your company.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.)

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

My colleagues Sebastian Soler , Steven Greenberg and I recently launched a new online community, PEVCTech.com , exclusively for PE/VC investors; engineers who work at PE/VC funds; and other technologists who specialize in working on this problem. The Pocket Negotiator is very early-stage attempt to aid in the negotiating process itself. .

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Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

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North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Following is his advice to early stage entrepreneurs for creating structure in their company. So, I’ll explain my reasoning through the story of ASC, a fictitious company that has a combination of characteristics I’ve seen across a number of early stage companies. Three months in, the burn is now at $70k/month.

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Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

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. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. — An experienced team made all the difference to 2U finding success, Jeremy said: We had a phenomenal early group of people that were brought together to try to address the problem.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

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 customer/market risk.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Dino and I kept in touch as he moved up to Bend, Oregon on a mission to engineer Bend into a regional technology cluster.

Silicon Valley 312

Silicon Valley Oregon Lean Venture Capital 312

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. — An experienced team made all the difference to 2U finding success, Jeremy said: We had a phenomenal early group of people that were brought together to try to address the problem.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

The companies I spoke to all agreed that the community there was extremely supportive, especially in the critical ulta-early-stage. Then, create an encouraging environment for early-stage companies. Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. And do your customer development.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Continuous Deployment 113

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

One would think that designing a medical device would be a simple engineering problem, and startups would be emerging right and left. Early stage Venture Capital for medical device startups has dried up. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Science and Industrial Policy , Teaching.

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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. I got to spend time inside his company while I was using their software to analyze early-stage ventures. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. Startups now understand what they should be doing in their early formative days is search for a business model. Victor Hugo.

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Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 281

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

Other than measuring engineering progress, there’s no standard language to communicate progress. While it doesn’t eliminate great investor judgment, pattern recognition skills and mentoring, we’ve developed an Investment Readiness Level tool that fills in these missing pieces. Here’s John’s story.

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Sacramento Framework Customer Development Lean 306

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JUNE 12, 2012

(from his blog post ) …some civil engineers think the world of project management in their field is ripe for revolution, but do I know enough of them? I talked to 30 people before I realized that a certain idea of mine was a crappy idea, and about 40 people before starting WP Engine. How many should I talk to?

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Customer Customer Development Dilution Engineer 252

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. The goal is for them is to observe this class, then host and teach the next round of 50 NSF Innovation Corps scientist/engineer teams in July. The GameSpeed customer discovery narrative blog is here. Here are the first five.

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Lean Business Model Agile United States 256

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? But all things are never equal.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 26, 2013

Vitruvian is a good example of a great early stage therapeutics idea with animal data missing and many key components of the business model still needed to verify. Principal Investigators, scientists and engineers can’t figure out commercialization sitting in their labs. If you can’t see the video above click here.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

I thought a good place to start was with the origins of the idea that "software design" should be considered a discipline in its own right, on par with computer science, software engineering, and computer programming. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

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Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

It required hearing customers say it over and over again for us to take a serious look, and eventually to realize that social networking was core to our business. Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. Dont confuse passion with volume.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. What is customer development?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

Why don’t we have standards for what metrics VC’s want to see from their early stage startup teams? Data from the Startup Genome project shows that startups that have helpful mentors, listen to customers, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x Angels In America. better user growth.

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 290

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

Why don’t we have standards for what metrics VC’s want to see from their early stage startup teams? Data from the Startup Genome project shows that startups that have helpful mentors, listen to customers, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x Angels In America. better user growth.

Silicon Valley 258

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 258

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. There’s a much better way.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 1, 2016

She is an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Cooper Union. Nina has a bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from the Cooper Union, a master’s in Bioelectrical Engineering from MIT, a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and an MBA from Columbia University. If you can’t hear the clip, click here.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Michigan Detroit 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

A discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The event will include a talk from Eric on The Lean Startup over dinner, followed by moderated table discussion and then final Q&A with Eric.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

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. With that information in hand, Engineering estimates delivery dates and development costs.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 15, 2011

Startups now understand what they should be doing in their early formative days is search for a business model. The process they use to guide that search is "Customer Development" ; and to track their progress startups now have a scorecard to document their week-by-week changes – the business model canvas.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2009

Many founders dont like to hear that visionary customers are as smart, maybe even more so, than they are. Startups need to spend time with these customers. In fact, early stage companies shouldnt be able to get time from anyone else - who else would be crazy enough to try an truly innovative new product?

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