Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

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

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Teams talk to 10-15 customers a week and make a minimum of 100 customer visits.

Intellectual Property 283

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 283

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Insufficient capital, over investment, and low sales are just some of the reasons leading to this sobering statistic. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. There are principally three engines of growth in any startup.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

NYU Engineering Commencement Speech. Thank you for the opportunity to address you on your graduation from this esteemed engineering school. I saw something that they didn’t and to their credit…Berkeley’s Business School and then Stanford’s Engineering School let me write and teach a new course based on my ideas.

Lean 222

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 222

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

—— I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. Finnish private investors don’t yet have enough time-in-grade to have developed good pattern recognition skills, and most lack operating backgrounds.

Finland 325

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 325

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

I''ve been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales. . Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. How do I build a repeatable, scalable sales process that is like an industrial machine - not a crafts project? 1) Enterprise Sales.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 12, 2020

If people aren’t coming into your physical store, consider whether you can refocus sales online. Now has never been a more important time to have a website – many physical stores have also started operating as online stores, allowing them to take in business during lockdown. Focus more attention online. Social media marketing.

Marketing 246

Marketing Social Media PPC SEO 246

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

Max entered Stanford in the fall of 2010 as a freshman, took as many of the engineering entrepreneurship classes as he could and independent study with me. (He Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Through advertising or direct sales, these sites harvest intent. Instead of making a few dollars per sale and hoping for thousands of sales, you sell to only a few customers, and charge much higher rates. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. they have purchasing intent ).*. The Curation Team.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

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. Prior to his investing and advisory career, Evangelos spent 20+ years in high-technology industries, in executive roles spanning operations, marketing, sales and engineering.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

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

JULY 25, 2011

Scientists and engineers as founders and startup CEOs is one of the least celebrated contributions of Silicon Valley. ESL, the first company I worked for in Silicon Valley , was founded by a PhD in Math and six other scientists and engineers. It might be its most important. ———-. Cold War Spin Outs.

Engineer 307

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 307

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features. Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. Tim started to change our processes.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

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 126

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 126

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof. There was nothing for the consumer to do.

Video 168

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Alice and Bettina had taken an idea they had tested in the class – building toys for young girls to have fun with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and started a company. But we were meeting to talk about sales and marketing. Hiring Channel Sales. “So They learned a ton. You got on a plane yourself and went to China.

PR 316

PR China Lean Channel 316

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?

Search 322

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 322

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Teten: How is the corporate VC model evolving: in how they interact with portfolio companies or the operating side of their organization? Corporate venture funds compete against their independent peers for the best deals by doubling down on their ‘strategic’ benefits, mainly access to the operating units of their parent companies. .

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 13, 2011

I was invited to Finland as part of Stanford's Engineering Technology Venture Program partnership with Aalto University. 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."

Finland 158

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 158

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. What a great idea. No, not really.

Customer Development 280

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited. At month six, one of the early hires leaves, a developer who turns out wasn’t a good fit. The people on the sales side don’t feel they can charge for it yet because who’s going to take out their wallet for something that isn’t perfect.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

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. Yet without direct and continuous customer contact, it’s unknown whether the features will hold any appeal to customers. Executing on a sales and marketing plan.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Alice and Bettina had taken an idea they had tested in the class – building toys for young girls to have fun with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, and started a company. But we were meeting to talk about sales and marketing. Hiring Channel Sales. “So They learned a ton. You got on a plane yourself and went to China.

PR 208

PR China Lean Channel 208

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 22, 2012

You just can’t half-heartedly paste a few new tactics on top of your current operations and expect advocates to start singing your praises. The program has to be well staffed so it becomes a seamless and well integrated part of your entire growth engine. At what points in the sales process should references be used?

Programming 145

Programming Customer Social Media Advisory Board 145

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. I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. But here’s where a truly great sales artist comes in. Get product into customers’ hands.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.).

Wiki 312

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. Lean vs. debt In the world of physical goods, the leaner a supply chain is, the less debt is required to operate it. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

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?

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 6, 2014

It detailed exactly what everyone was to do at every stage for every product, with instructions for every department ranging from hardware to software, and on to operations, finance, marketing, even the support teams that troubleshoot and repair the product after it goes to market.”

Product 84

Product Venture Capital Lean Finance 84

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

My engineers say our website is old school, and we need to be on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, my VP of Sales says we’re wasting our marketing dollars not targeting the right people and my board keeps giving me their opinions of how we should describe our product and company. with a strategy. What’s the call to action?

Marketing 312

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 312

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. That’s why we have operations alerts trigger a page, but it can also work for other customer events. And here is the howto for your sales bell: [link] Have fun! :-) June 9, 2009 1:42 AM David Skillern said.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84