Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. I heard from a few investors that as the startup ecosystem is relatively new, there’s a battle for experienced engineering talent and lack of experienced C-level execs.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

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. Over the quarter, teams of students would put the theory to work, using these tools to get out of the building and talk to customer/partners, etc.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. This wave of 1950′s/’60′s startups (Watkins-Johnson, Varian, Huggins Labs, MEC, Stewart Engineering, etc.) And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

I’ve spent the last week in Santiago, a guest of Professor Cristóbal García at the Catholic University of Chile as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program. Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad. Teaching in Chile.

Chile 235

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 235

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. I heard from a few investors that as the startup ecosystem is relatively new, there’s a battle for experienced engineering talent and lack of experienced C-level execs.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

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. It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. Seeing Is Believing. And there it was.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. I hope this thinking already sounds inane to you. What plan says that?

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

We were sitting in our conference room in our first “system-planning meeting” trying to define the specifications of our new supercomputer and make the trade-offs between what was possible to build, and what customers in this new market would actually want and need. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 271

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

In 1978 when I joined my first company , information about how to start companies simply didn’t exist. Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I’m going to go do that Customer Development stuff after we raise money.”

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

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.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

In order to bring the most value to your business, it’s important you explore ways to enhance your customer experience. While app development can be very beneficial, that’s only true if it’s done the right way. As the technology industry continues to grow, the tech talent pool has expanded exponentially. Source: Pexels.

Developer 93

Developer Offshore Software Developers Software Development 93

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

They shared their experiences of how technology has enhanced – and threatens to undermine – diplomatic work. The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

They shared their experiences of how technology has enhanced – and threatens to undermine – diplomatic work. The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Innovation outposts in Silicon Valley allow big companies to sense and respond to rapid changes in technology. He is also a Consulting Professor at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering Department and Editor-in-Chief of the AIAA Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. Filed under: Customer Development.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

A study done by SurveyMonkey and Search Engine Land found that brand name was the first thing people looked for when clicking on search engine results: Source. 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).

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

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

JUNE 29, 2009

It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. Are You Single?

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Knowing your customers is the single biggest driver of startup success, and there’s no substitute for getting out of the building to learn about their problems and needs. Like Matthew, Jason sees enormous value in talking with customers: The biggest thing I learned was just how much you don’t know. Get out of the building.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Colorado Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

What does your Chief Technology Officer do all day? When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Heres my take.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

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.

Customer 420

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. A Five-sided Market.

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2013

All of this information would help farmers increase yields (making more money) and reduce costs by using less water and fertilizer/chemicals but only applying where it was needed. Smart team, real domain experts in hyper-spectral imaging, drone design, good start on customer discovery, beginning to think about product/market fit, etc.

Product 335

Product Customer Development Forecast Engineer 335

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

I suggested that to validate their minimum viable product it would be much cheaper to rent a camera and plane or helicopter, and fly over the farmers field, hand process the data and see if that’s the information farmers would pay for. All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost.

Customer 316

Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 316

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

Currently a market leader, they’re watching a new and relentless competitor with more money, more people and more advanced technology appear seemingly out of nowhere, attempting to grab customers and gain market share. How do they convert existing manufacturing plants (and their workforce) for a completely new set of technologies?

Framework 389

Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 389

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

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

Or were they 2) an information exchange, providing matching services for cloud computing buyers and sellers, providing matching services. The Agora team decided to formalize the customer discovery process by coming up with a set of Customer Discovery principles and questions that were as good as any I’ve seen.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

The Navy informs Terman that, “money was not a problem but time was.” Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. Unless you had the proper clearances you couldn’t read them.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. No kidding. Every one of them. (To

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office.

Silicon Valley 205

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The engineering team would then build that feature, mimicking the UI as close as they could using the current primitives supported by the system. The meeting was tense.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Two studies have shown that only about 10 percent of promoters actually refer profitable new customers. Some of the most creative technology coming out of Silicon Valley is designed to do exactly that. That’s right. You have to make it easy for them to do so.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

customer development. agile engineering. Some general customer development slides click here. Called “ How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad ,” it walks you through the Business Model Canvas and an overview of the customer development process. Click here for more information. Find it here.

Open Source 335

Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When a customer tells you how they feel about your ideas, that doesnt tell you anything about your ideas. It tells you something about what that customer thinks and feels. Figuring out whether and how to incorporate that new information into your vision is your job. As Steve says, "That’s what we get paid to do."

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166