Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us?

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Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

While it sounds simple , the Build Measure Learn approach to product development is a radical improvement over the traditional Waterfall model used throughout the 20 th century to build and ship products. They are: value proposition, product/service the company offers (along with its benefits to customers).

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Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

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. What I saw reminded me of some of the best and worst things I did as a founder. If not your co-founders, someone outside the company.”.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 26, 2018

In our experience, structured customer development work is right up there amongst the most valuable things a founder can do in the early days of their startup. Once you have an idea that feels strong, it’s imperative to speak with customers about it. But good customer development is tough to do.

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Customer Framework Differentiation Customer Development 75

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

The Founder’s New Insight Smart founders are never satisfied with simply executing their current business model, they are constantly observing, orienting and deciding whether their current business model can be made better. But the purpose of this post is what happens when a founder (or large company CEO) finds a better business model.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.

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Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder September 7, 2010 | View Comments Steve Job's Technical Co-Founder “I’ve got this HUGE idea. I just need to find a technical co-founder.&# I was in this situation and we barely escaped.

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Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

What are the terms of their relationship with the founder? I’ve also asked this question on Quora.There, I ask for advice on how to best structure this for all parties: The development shop, the founders (outside of the dev shop), and potential outside investors. What are the timelines? The discounts? The cliffs? The fine print?

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Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

“If you can fix a problem for someone and do it better, quicker, and/or cheaper than your competitor, you’re off to a good start.” – Gabriel Kuperman, founder and CEO of CuePin. We created UpKeep to fill this void—a cloud-based solution that was affordable for any size business.” – Ryan Chan, founder of UpKeep.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. Or to some passionate customers.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 128

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

There are often counter-intuitive changes in customer behavior that depend on little details. In fact, the curse of product development is that sometimes small things make a huge difference and sometimes huge things make no difference. When we’re optimizing, product development teams encounter similar situations.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

blog.aparttimecto.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Unless you’re fortunate to have one or more technical founders, you’ll quickly be faced with this simple question: Do we hack out a prototype somehow, find a developer or outsource the development? Create the prototype yourself Pros: Cheap - this only takes up the time of your and your founders.

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CTO Hire Fractional CTO Equity Vesting 40

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

You might get a bunch of inbound emails from other press and partners, and all of these things can contribute to a feeling that you’re on your way to getting tons of traffic. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? It strokes your ego.

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

We pitch to potential partners, vendors, publishers, conferences, employees, and even lawyers. Its different from selling a product, because it is not part of our regular business practice, is not something that relates to our core competence, and tends not to happen in a repeatable and scalable way. who is the customer?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 128

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And when we do make bets, they’re small bets on incremental products or acquisitions that simply add to the bottom line.”. Bob looked wistful, “Our founders built a company known for taking risks and moving fast. and how to price the product. for new product development that emphasize immediate returns.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Establish credibility with potential partners. In some businesses, especially in certain industries like traditional enterprise software, you simply cannot bring a new product to market on your own. You need to combine your product with others, and this requires partners like OEMs or system integrators.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

I thought Id share a little bit of that, too: I’ve been interested in different approaches to software development going back to 1987 when – in my first company Feld Technologies – my partner Dave Jilk and I started talking about “semi-custom software development&# (way ahead of its time).

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

.” Hackernews list of “Tools of the Trade” for startups - includes over 150 SaaS tools used by startups, and over 150 comments with interesting insights from founders. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Great for visualizing work of product development. Mark Suster GRP Partners Advice.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

As a result, the companies get a lot of exposure to VCs, investors, and partners in larger, more traditional startup hubs. And do your customer development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Some of the mentors are based in Boulder, but many are not.

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San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Continuous Deployment 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2010

Sure, when entrepreneurs create startups that grow up into mature companies, they become part of an established industry, with its own ecosystem, norms, partners and best practices. This is just like a startup to me, complete with distribution and product development challenges, ecosystem design and many, many customers.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

I got a powerful taste of datablindness recently, as I’ve started to work with various large companies as partners in setting up events, speeches, and other products to sell around the Lean Startup concept. There are lots of good reasons why I can’t have instantaneous access to this data, and each partner has their own.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, " Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination? "). Customer discovery turns founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. This is a minimum viable product.

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Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder 119

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 27, 2009

This will be an in-depth discussion with a handful of entrepreneurs and founders that have been pre-selected. Herein lies the reason my partner and I started Dillotronics - as well as the reason your take on the matter resonated so well here. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Lean Austin San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Team Configuration 500 Startups Guerilla Marketing Organizations Entrepreneurship Startup Founders & Entrepreneurs Startups Startup Incubators and Seed Programs Seedcamp Y Combinator TechStars Lean Startups What is the perfect startup team? Lakshman Prasad • Nov 16, 2010.

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Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

At the end of the day, the product development team of a startup (large or small) is a service organization. It exists to serve the needs of customers, and it does this by offering its capabilities to other functions in the company, and partnering with them. So, fellow hackers, Id love to hear from you.

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Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Non-Technical Co-Founders Co-Founders Technical Co-founders Finding Co-Founders Startups & "How Important Are Ideas?" " Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea.

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Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

What is the best advice you can give for finding a business partner? Don’t quickly choose any business partner. what are the most crucial steps to be taken by a new tech startup when outsourcing major part of the tech to IT firms or outsourcing “product development” eg new social media website project?

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Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

So for this first post, here’s the best advice I can give you: join an awesome founding team and get your product out the door ASAP. One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. If no one ever uses your product, you have no value.

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? What went wrong?

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

This is especially useful in situations, like most B2B businesses, where the total number of customers is likely to be small. This case study illustrates one company’s attempt to do customer development by testing their vision with customers before writing a single line of code. Oh, this is just a Photoshop file?

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San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

But it became clear that if IMVU was ever going to become a mainstream business, we had to effectively fire these early customers. Suffice to say that our partners, vendors, and most importantly regular mainstream customers all found the idea disturbing. The reasons were many and complex, so I won’t rehash them all here.

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Community Management Lean Software Review 158

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster. They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. Edwin: I know.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 1, 2009

I see that as a great way for my product to grow, but while Ive partnered with companies in my consulting business, its not something Im as familiar with now that Im on the product side. I question what numbers I would need to be considered respectable and/or worth a potential partners time. eric: briefly, you rock dude.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60