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. ———– Whether your venture is a new pizza parlor or the hottest new software product, beware: These nine flawed assumptions are toxic.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

I was glad to see him but it was clear over coffee that he was struggling with his first hiring failure. I’ve been running our company, cycling through Customer Discovery and Validation and the board suggested that I was running out of bandwidth and needed some help in closing our initial orders. selling a known product to.

Startup 312

Startup Business Model Customer Development Bandwidth 312

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. Over the years marketers have found that using numbers to compare yourself to other products works well.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Its in reverse-chronological order, so start with page 3 or just use Seans handy reference. When I first encountered customer development , it was considered pure lunacy by mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs. Its in reverse-chronological order, so start with page 3 or just use Seans handy reference.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

It’s common, perhaps the norm, for startups to pivot like that—to discover that a product is catching on in unintended ways worth pursuing. First, because the amateurs weren’t SEC-registered, the site had to refer to them with awkward terms like “geniuses.&# Thus far the results are encouraging.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? Change who your product is for.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Alas, they arent published in a dead-tree medium yet, so I cant say something like "they are the essential reference on my bookcase." The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? but rest assured they would be. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

This condition makes it much easier for teams to innovate, experiment, and achieve sustained productivity. One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

If you don’t value your product neither will your customers. In the early days of building Qualtrics, Ryan tried giving the product away to entice customers to use it. — Finding early customers for Qualtrics was difficult, Ryan says. Ironically, though, academics are horrible customers.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 145

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. Have you worked with or for a great CTO?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

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. He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

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. Who’s the user of product? with a strategy.

Marketing 310

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 29, 2010

I believe it means were achieving product/market fit for a set of ideas. These case studies range in size and scope: from pre-product/market fit to already exited, bootstrapped to venture-backed, solo practitioner to large organization. Sure, everyone knows that getting customer feedback is important. Congratulations.

San Francisco 120

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 8, 2016

If you don’t value your product neither will your customers. In the early days of building Qualtrics, Ryan tried giving the product away to entice customers to use it. — Finding early customers for Qualtrics was difficult, Ryan says. Ironically, though, academics are horrible customers.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder New York City Entrepreneur New York 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Corporate venture funds are often referred to as ‘strategic’ investors because of the unique benefits they bring to the table. It comes as no surprise as technology today enables companies to prove product-market fit much earlier in their lifecycles. Could they excel at customer development with enterprises?

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 8, 2009 Datablindness Most of us are swimming in a sea of data about our products, companies, and teams. For example, a recent event I held started with a customer validation exercise (actually, this example is fictionalized for clarity). Too much of this data is non- actionable.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Think, for example, about the way we talk about sales and customer development and the idea of ‘getting out of the building.’ Impatient investors and team members give little support to a founder trying to do Customer Development to verify or modify that idea. They often look on this as a waste of time.

Silicon Valley 168

Silicon Valley Lean Puerto Rico Japan 168

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2010

Lean Startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas. Lean, when used in the context of lean startup, refers to a process of building companies and products using lean manufacturing principles applied to innovation. Myth: The Lean Startup methodology is only for Web 2.0/internet/consumer

Lean 167

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 167

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 5, 2016

While many small business owners made preparations such as hiring support staff, placing advance orders, checking inventory and promoting their business, they may not have thought through one important element – how to ensure these holiday customers want to come back long after the season is over.

Customer 100

Customer Distribution Government Agile 100

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti Should You Hire a Programmer or DIY? Hire a programmer. Advice: See this great article on how to hire a programmer. In fact, you’re initial product isn’t a real tech company, it’s a tech-enabled company. Sales / Marketing.

Hiring 41

Hiring Cofounder Ruby Founder 41

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2015

The reality is that healthcare customers know that startups’ portals are likely hosted by AWS, Azure, or Google, and therefore pose security and privacy concerns. My reference points on these startups are digital health startups and small device startups that gather data from patients remotely. That may be true…not likely.

Startup 120

Startup Early Stage Azure Lean 120

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

However you get to a good product is how you need to get to a good product. It sounds like youre assuming that your execution will be flawless, even something to be copied by competitors, but how can you know without testing it on the customer? Idea (A) is just a broad concept of a new product. But, so does vision.

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 31, 2009

A common question I get asked is "do you know someone amazing that we can hire?" I do my best to play matchmaker, but as those of you who have ever tried to fill a job in a startup know, the most important and elusive quality for a startup hire is fit. Great startups are always hiring, if the fit is right.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Startup Continuous Deployment 68

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Consequently, I either needed a tech co-founder or to pay someone to develop the product. You might as well hire an outsourced team.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

To be clear, though, this diversity refers only to diversity of opinion, not necessarily to demographic diversity. After all, if you already have an all-male startup, you’re already at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring the very women that could fix that imbalance. Beyond hiring, our actual work process matters, too.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

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. How to move from a free to a paid product without losing all your users. Jason: get into customer development and it’s a big waste.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 9, 2009

First OODA reference: Ideas. Validated learning about customers * 8.0 Minimum Viable Product: a guide You can see and even install the Top Posts widget yourself if you like (simple install for blogger blogs): [link] Not bad, dude. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 84

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

You are here: Home » Hiring » Crazy! Written By Dan Martell on February 2nd, 2012 | Category: Hiring LeanStartup Marketing Metrics Startup Life | 6 Comments. Building Product 2. Would it be a good idea clubbing all the other products / services under 1 venture, because some of them are totally unrelated.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, December 30, 2008 Assessing fit with the Wisdom of Crowds When I wrote earlier about how to conduct a good technical interview , I had only a few things to say about how to assess if the candidate fits in with the team, including this: This responsibility falls squarely to the hiring manager.

San Francisco 83

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 83

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

September, 2012 – Andrew Chen, who currently does growth at Uber , writes You don’t need a growth hacker , which encourages companies to really consider whether they have product-market fit before hiring a growth hacker. They need products that are really working in the market. via AndrewChen.co). ” Curiosity.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

SVPG

MAY 17, 2012

Normally I like to keep my newsletters to discussions of organization, process and best practices that I believe apply to nearly all technology companies, and I limit the number of product-specific techniques I discuss because of that. MVP : Our initial focus must be on achieving the minimum viable product.

Product 62

Product Germany Seattle Advertising 62

Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

The word hypothesis means a lot of different things, but in this context I like this definition from Wikipedia the best: People refer to a trial solution to a problem as a hypothesis, often called an "educated guess”, because it provides a suggested solution based on the evidence. Families were getting value from the product.

Metrics 156

Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy&# or “our team moves too slow.&# The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 14, 2012

The class was designed to teach educators (and the entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. Align and train mentors to embrace customer development. and I had to pull them back when we met in class.

Developer 300

Developer Arizona Lean Business Model 300