Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. Would you mind if you could share to us the name your competitor who stole your ideas ?

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 248

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2014

In my interview with Hunter, we discuss: The key responsibilities of a business development professional. How to get big name testimonials and clients. The importance of the customer feedback cycle & the role it plays for AWeber. It’s Not A Conversion Problem, It’s A Customer Development Problem.

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Developer API Cofounder New Jersey 104

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies, Intel and Digital Equipment, names that at that time carried a lot of weight. Your response and version #3 begs another question, namely: was everyone treated this way or just you? Customer development isn’t just for [.]

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SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

recently did a lecture at a Babson MBA summer class on Entrepreneurial Leadership. The Phantom Sales Forecast – Failing at Customer Validation - Steve Blank , July 22, 2010 Startup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” – word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. You never heard of them because their work was secret.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.” Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.]

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

Using my existing skills and resources (including an old domain name), I tested a productized digital PR offer. This way, you can focus on business development, communications, and awareness to build a sales pipeline and “validate” early demand. And so, the concept for a digital PR service was born. and had the same effect.

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Any customer who used the four critical color publishing applications was going to be blown away by how much better the SuperMac boards were. Tell Me How to Find You But having benchmarks in hand that showed us as the winner did us no good unless all our potential customers could see them.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 126

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 268

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Often companies think their Rock Star customers are the biggest spenders, or the most loyal customers, or perhaps the marquee names or brands. So who are your potential high-value Rock Star customers? In my book, “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers “, I provide a model for helping you find and cultivate them.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I worked at Multiflow, a name you’d recognize, ending up running the OS group. He was my role model at Convergent, mentor at Ardent and partner at E.piphany. Future posts will have some Ben stories. steve Chris Ryland , on October 5, 2009 at 12:08 pm Said: Anyway, looking forward to this series.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect. Discovering that your worldview is wrong or mistaken can be a life-changing event.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 206

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The “Good” Student » 14 Responses Shane Rogers , on April 6, 2009 at 1:37 pm Said: The names of ‘secret’ customers is funny. If you think the Cold War turned out the right side up (i.e.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Silence.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 206

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Prior to founding Keen Home , Nayeem Hussain spent his career focusing on M&A, corporate development/strategy, and financial analysist, first at Prudential Financial and then at Loral Space & Communications. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Orders increased.

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Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. This post, which is divided in two parts, is the story of the first time it happened to me. You created it and own it.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

You may know it by its final name. Filed under: Customer Development , Marketing , SuperMac , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , SuperMac « Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions Gravity Will be Turned Off » 17 Responses EricS , on May 11, 2009 at 11:05 am Said: I loved my Spigot.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

My name is Crystal Williams, and I maintain a small business blog called Babeofbusiness.com. 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. Thus, these pages.

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YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

Rather, they did these things because a) SAS software really was doing a terrific job, and b) getting the word out to their peers helped the customer champions build social capital. Your customers make better salespeople than you do, precisely because they don’t have any (obvious) skin in the game. Close the sale. An example is “Mr.

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Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

For example: Dropbox, Reddit, and Birch Box, to name a few. Mass TLC Unconference: Large annual conference put on by the MA Technology Leadership Council. Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. The Grand-daddy. Next major event? Future M on Oct 16.

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Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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. I help lead the Engineering Leadership SIG at SDForum and wonder if you would be interested in speaking to our group about lean starups. hope to hear from you.

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San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? The Modern Corporation Sloan is rightly credited with formalizing the idea of the modern U.S. One guy really did all of this. Who was he?

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 175

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

And 30 years later I was teaching in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him. Spooky Music Reading about Terman was like finding the missing link in my career. Here was the guy who invented the field I had spent the first five years of my adult life working on. Play spooky music here.

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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

” As the managing editor of Bplans, I’ve had the good fortune to learn about business via the content we share; through interviews with LivePlan customers and other business owners; and thanks to brilliant, informal coaching from people like Tim Berry, Noah Parsons, and the rest of the executive leadership team at Palo Alto Software.

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David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

I was fortunate to get some thoughtful input from the leadership of DarwinApps , Casual Corp , Coventure , HappyFunCorp , OAB Studies , and World Accelerator. Customer development would be reduced to a single person exercise that could be repeated in parallel dozens of times over, ultimately yielding 30+ companies a year.

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Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Do you know the archetype of their customers? An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” This is easy to test.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. If you drop the sentimentality, a company is a merely a brand-name for a historical context. And brand-names are ultimately are just commodities that can be bought and sold (e.g., Agilent is a $5.8 billion dollar test and measurement company.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 182

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

In talking with Mary Poppendieck about it, she said that the Chief Engineer role at 3M was called a "Product Champion" The name is less important than understanding the depth of competence that this person has, and what it takes to build it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.) Now, whenever I screen resumes, I ask the recruiter to black out any demographic information from the resume itself: name, age, gender, country of origin. I want to especially recognize Vivek Wadhwa and Brad Feld for their leadership.)

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San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 268

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

This was about the time Christies and Sotheby’s were starting to auction Soviet space program artifacts , and I was thinking that perhaps a spacesuit in the lobby would be appropriate given our name.

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