Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

If we tried to match them on their playing field we’d never catch up. A key lesson is that as an entrepreneur, you get to choose your segment. But with a little bit of thought it struck us that if we attempted to do that, our competitors had a pretty substantial advantage, since they held nearly 90% of combined market share.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. dumped Détente and embraced a new strategy to counter the Warsaw Pact by not matching them tank for tank or solider to solider.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If there aren’t any that match your company, create some. Tradeshow Seminars Almost all tradeshows have conferences and seminar sessions; is your company keynoting any? Leading or speaking at any? No is the wrong answer. I can’t imagine your company going to a tradeshow to create awareness and not being a speaker.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core&# entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing. Does any of this match your experience or people you know?

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Believing Your Own BS is Toxic Lots of noise and smoke before a product ships seems to be a toxic byproduct of enthusiastic entrepreneurs. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to listen to customers. It’s that as CEO I was too busy talking to the press and raising money to hear customer comments directly.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. So that means stuff like thinking about what a business model might be, it does mean customer development. So I have a question for you, Jason.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Since we were the hip, new, edgy, “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” video game company (more about “ big hat, no cattle ” startups in subsequent posts,) our office obviously had to match the image. Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Each of my competitors each had 5-10 graphics boards covering a range of prices with performance to match. This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. I went home to think about this. Instead of a product family, we had a single point product. Even our current product line had four graphics boards in it. What could we do?

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