K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

One of our first customers was a stock trading company in NY that wanted to host live stock chats. Another customer was my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, who was using it to host online class discussions for its distance education program. We found a customer whom we knew had the resources to pay.

Revenue 72

Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

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.

Customer 195

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

My co-author and business Partner Bob Dorf spends much of his time traveling the world teaching countries and companies how to run the Lean LaunchPad program. The program is funded by the Colombian government and modeled after the NSF Innovation-Corps program created and built by my partner and co-author Steve Blank.

Colombia 321

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 321

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. I also owe a great debt to Kent Beck, whose Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change was my first introduction to this kind of thinking. (So Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

My co-author and business Partner Bob Dorf spends much of his time traveling the world teaching countries and companies how to run the Lean LaunchPad program. The program is funded by the Colombian government and modeled after the NSF Innovation-Corps program created and built by my partner and co-author Steve Blank.

Colombia 271

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 271

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. channel partners and Chinese manufacturers and customer acquisition and activation programs outside their home country.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

on medical device revenues, regardless of profitability delays or cash-flow breakeven. Some startups in this field are actually beginning with Customer Development while others struggle with the classic execution versus search problem. But while these are all great programs, they are likely to fail to deliver on their promise.

Startup 294

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 294

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development. I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present.

Artificial Inteligence 318

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 318

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Sunny Shah , assistant director and faculty of the ESTEEM Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame. Sunny Shah. Curt Haselton. Sunny received his Ph.D.

Cofounder 190

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 190

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

That year the two founders decided to get serious about being a company, and hired a CEO. In today’s language of Customer Development , RIM positioned the Blackberry as a segment of an existing market – pager users who needed two-way communication. It let users record from the familiar program guide. TiVo Series 1.

Hockey Stick 271

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 271

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Sunny Shah , assistant director and faculty of the ESTEEM Graduate Program at the University of Notre Dame. Sunny Shah. Curt Haselton. Sunny received his Ph.D.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 120

Steve Blank

MAY 5, 2016

Founders will always encounter naysayers, shut out the voices and listen to the customers instead. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. It gets you to a business faster. Guido Kovalskys.

Brazil 158

Brazil Entrepreneur Cleveland Cofounder 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets. Amazon PostRank

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. What is customer development?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

MAY 5, 2016

Founders will always encounter naysayers, shut out the voices and listen to the customers instead. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. It gets you to a business faster. Guido Kovalskys.

Brazil 120

Brazil Entrepreneur Cleveland Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

How founders cope with startup challenges was the focus of today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. And world-class entrepreneurs never quit. Jessica Mah.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. It turned out that, during the course of the decline, one customer segment was losing customers while another was gaining customers. The company struggled mightily with how to explain this bad news to their board.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development. I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present.

Artificial Inteligence 120

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 120

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 15, 2017

by Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of “ The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue “ The fastest growing businesses today have a powerful secret weapon: superusers. This special group of customers goes far beyond using your services regularly and paying promptly.

Community 124

Community LLC Customer Developer 124

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that. Lets see why.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan Foundation , the Sloan School of Management at MIT , the Sloan program at Stanford , and the Sloan/Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in New York. The founder of what became General Motors was William (Billy) Durant. Billy Durant - Founder General Motors More in the next posts. There’s the Alfred P. What happened to him?

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. What is the right revenue model? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

The UCSF Office of Innovation and Technology ( Erik Lium and Stephanie Marrus) is the reason the program exists. It turns out that for commercialization, the business model (Customers, Channel, Revenue Model, etc.) Filed under: Customer Development , Life Sciences , Teaching. This can be taught.

Lean 258

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 258

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

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. Jason Young , co-founder of MindBlown Labs , which makes mobile social games to teach young adults about personal finance. And download any of the past shows here.).

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Colorado Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

There are huge classes of bugs that "work as designed" but cause catastrophic changes in customer behavior. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. Most QA teams are organized around finding reproduction paths for bugs that affect customers. Better handling of intermittent bugs.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. That is customer development. “But it never happened.&# [Alas, customers dont know what they want!

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Voluntary salary reduction program. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. Over-communicate with employees, investors, customers. Theres no better way to learn what customers want (or hate!).

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121