Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. It’s lazy thinking (and expensive engineering) to try to build for both at the same time. It has a growth engine.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Objects in Our Mirror are Larger than they Appear Our first goal was to set up benchmarks to measure the performance of our own graphics boards on the real applications our customers used (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker.) Now as VP of Marketing, I could have sat back and let my PR agency handle the press.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

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. They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 314

PR China Lean Channel 314

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. They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 206

PR China Lean Channel 206

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users." Paid - if your product monetizes customers better than your competitors, you have the opportunity to use your lifetime value advantage to drive growth. Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Do your customers really read TechCrunch? Do some Customer Development instead. Spend your time with renewable sources of customers and iterate.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. After years of engineering effort, changing these assumptions was incredibly hard. Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. We can capitalize on new customers.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

— Andy explained that, years ago, a PR person’s was to turn so-called influencers like journalists and analysts into advocates for your client. Positioning must be authentic, she stresses: Here’s the thing about great positioning or great PR: You have to be aligned with who you are. Filed under: Customer Development.

Washington 285

Washington Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder 285

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2010

Wait a minute, what about the rest of Customer Development ? Aren’t you going to validate your hypotheses by first getting some customers?”. Now I was confused, and I asked, “Well what do you guys believe – Customer Development or launch on a schedule?” Filed under: Ardent , Customer Development.

Customer Development 307

Customer Development Singapore Channel PR 307

crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 15, 2013

Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. I bet you over-engineered your startup – [link]. Google Launches Help Center For Hacked Sites | Search Engine Land – [link].

Social Media 105

Social Media Small Business Design Media 105

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Thanks to Suns amazing PR blitz, there was tremendous demand for experts on Java, and I did my best to convince people that I was one of that mythical breed.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

The Next Web

JANUARY 27, 2013

People told me it was impossible to have our product launch featured on one of the top tech blogs without spending $3,000 on some fancy PR agency. Especially because I could have used this time on marketing, sales and customer development, and actually helped our business move forward. You’re not alone.

Netherlands 159

Netherlands Technical Review Software Review Cofounder 159

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Lessons Learned.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Microsoft will find local “MVP” customers who are well connected in their local communities, and who want to increase their status, and help them do so by providing access to early releases and “insider knowledge.” That’s right. Rock Star advocates can help.).

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 22, 2012

The program has to be well staffed so it becomes a seamless and well integrated part of your entire growth engine. There are certain predictable mistakes companies make that can derail customer reference programs before they ever get off the ground.

Programming 145

Programming Customer Social Media Advisory Board 145

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Reply steveblank , on September 16, 2009 at 7:00 pm said: Greg, The Google Group “Lean Startup Circle&# at [link] is a wonderful repository of Customer Development/Lean Startup success and failure. It’s more reference material. Thus, these pages. I’ll add more as time goes on.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? The obvious one’s were who were they?

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185

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 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) | Customer Development Labs - [link]. Google App Engine is ready for primetime says Reddit/Hipmunk co-founder – [link]. Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) | Customer Development Labs - [link]. ” - [link].

Social Media 93

Social Media Small Business Design Media 93

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. VC Firm. $ Tech % of workforce. Google Ventures (GV). 17% (13 / 80).

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

When people (ok, engineers) who have been trained in this model enter most startups, they quickly get confused. How can we do split-testing when we have only a pathetically small number of customers ? There’s always that engineer in the back of the room with all the corner cases: “but how will customers find Feature X?

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

— Andy explained that, years ago, a PR person’s was to turn so-called influencers like journalists and analysts into advocates for your client. Positioning must be authentic, she stresses: Here’s the thing about great positioning or great PR: You have to be aligned with who you are. Filed under: Customer Development.

Washington 120

Washington Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

Journalists, PR firms, investors, and the public at large love a scrappy come-from-behind story about two guys in a garage who figured out how to take down Goliath. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 26, 2012

But in Menlo Park, every commute is highly variable, no matter how short, and so I often found myself sitting in traffic, bored, and eager to get to my desk to work on whatever engineering problem I was obsessed with. It's a wide-ranging call-in show that covers just about every topic you can imagine.

Lean 159

Lean San Francisco Houston Engineer 159

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. We were combining Stanford Engineering theory with ESL design engineers and implementing it with chips so new we were debugging the silicon as we were debugging the entire system. It had no PR agency. It shunned publicity.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 270

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Noah Parsons says, “Start collecting contact information for interested, prospective customers. Develop a landing page, do some lightweight advertising, and generally reach out to as many potential customers as you can.”. Do your own PR. Whether or not you’ve got the budget, doing your own PR to start with is a good idea.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

And in comes the Google App Engine as Google's offering in this context. Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google's App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job, and requires a lot of custom development. Building new apps is also not as simple. Enter OrangeScape. Photo by ilco. Discuss.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur India Silicon Valley Massachusetts 114

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Even worse, entrepreneurs are faced with a constant barrage of vanity metrics from competitors and other companies engaged in PR. That’s what you pay PR firms for: to get an article written that is entirely factual and yet still provides positive spin for your company. The PR firm helpfully left out that context.)

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering schoo l.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 153

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Whats striking about these stories, if you get past the PR hype, are two very important themes: These prodigies were self-taught, and had a fundamental fascination with technology from a very young age. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

The Message Sitting around a conference room table brainstorming messages that might resonate with customers, or worse having a PR agency doing that for you, is a firing offense in a small company. You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers. Visually, demo’s, wild colors, etc.

Silicon Valley 178

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 178

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. I want to go to this homepage and think me, as the founder of WP Engine, I want to go in here and think, ‘Oh my God, we need this,’ and then sign up. No, I’m a very happy customer actually. Jason: Yeah. Edwin: Right.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. is it really that the only people who can build great startups are engineers? Engineers don’t always have the best business ideas.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

The higher the vanity ratio, the more effective the PR. It helps companies with PR. And companies crave positive PR and control over their message – all for rational reasons. The higher the vanity ratio, the more effective the PR. It helps companies with PR. It sells newspapers and magazines.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Metrics PR 167

market-by-numbers.com

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? The “encroachment&# of business or engineering on design is (theoretically) dependent on the driving force, rather than personal bias. Please Share!

San Diego 40

San Diego RSS Lean Elevator Pitch 40