Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. Here’s how that happened. We had a killer team and all the right skillsets.

Lean 320

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 320

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? For software, we have many - you can enjoy a nice long list on Wikipedia. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." This is a common mistake.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. After some trial and error, Ive settled on the Lean Startup. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

The product or website (be it software, e-commerce, or a service) might be awesome , but if it puts itself in front of the wrong market, or packages itself so the right market can’t figure out why it’s awesome, the startup will fail. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development?

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Steve Blank

JANUARY 2, 2014

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. Lessons Learned.

Lean 249

Lean Algorithm Customer Development IP 249

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 31, 2015

The following is a guest post by Kirsten Cluthe and Ritika Puri from The Lean Startup Conference team Wondering what’s new in the Lean Startup community? Every year, our team conducts more than 500 customer development calls to understand what challenges the community is facing. Here are some of our favorites: 1.

Lean 60

Lean United States Fractional CTO Startup 60

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups. Here’s how. Build-Measure-Learn.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

See the presentation here.). It has replaced how to write a business plan with hands-on Lean Startup methods. To create great entrepreneurs, we had to give our students the experience of navigating the chaos and uncertainty of running a lean startup while providing the same kind of rigorous framework the business plan did in its day.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customer development. Filed under: Customer Development.

San Jose 259

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 259

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, July 30, 2009 Techstars brings The Lean Startup to Boulder Im very excited to announce a pair of events that will kick off a very busy fall speaking tour. The event will include a talk from Eric on The Lean Startup over dinner, followed by moderated table discussion and then final Q&A with Eric.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. The same might be said of good software. Here we have the beginnings of a theory of design for software.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, February 9, 2009 The lean startup @ Web 2.0 Expo to explain the lean startup concept to a larger audience. The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products.: It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0,

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Web Advisory Board 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 27, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, May 27, 2009 Austin: the Lean Startup tour continues Next week I head to Austin, TX for my first visit ever. Heres their description of the event: The current macroeconomic climate presents unparalleled opportunities for those that can thrive with constrained resources. You can register here.

Lean 60

Lean Austin San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, March 25, 2009 The Lean Startup at Agile Vancouver April 21st A surprising number of respondents in the latest Lessons Learned survey hail from one of the flourishing startup hubs in Canada. This workshop brings together leading thinkers from Lean Production and Lean software.

Agile 60

Agile Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Understanding the left-side of the mission model canvas ( activities, resources , partners , and costs) forces all teams to ask, “Are we building a product for a DOD/IC customer only or do we have a “dual-use” product that could be sold commercially and get funded by venture capital?”. Team Presentations: Weeks 8 and 9.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, March 17, 2009 Join the Lean Startup discussion at Web 2.0 Expo for free Im honored to announce that my Lean Startup session at the Web 2.0 Everyone else can register to come to both sessions for free, including the Lean Startup talk in the main conference. What does this mean for you?

Lean 76

Lean San Francisco Web Continuous Deployment 76

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, May 14, 2009 The Lean Startup Workshop - now an OReilly Master Class My rate of posting has been much lower lately, and this is mostly due to preparations for the upcoming Lean Startup Workshop on May 29. This shift allowed us to crank out working software quickly as a service.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Hacking for Diplomacy takes the Lean Startup methodology and applies it to problems sourced from the State Department. Teams are continuing their relentless interviewing of customers, or beneficiaries as we call them in this class. What we’re driving at is evidence-based, entrepreneurial solutions to big diplomatic challenges.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Hacking for Diplomacy takes the Lean Startup methodology and applies it to problems sourced from the State Department. Teams are continuing their relentless interviewing of customers, or beneficiaries as we call them in this class. What we’re driving at is evidence-based, entrepreneurial solutions to big diplomatic challenges.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. If we accept the verdict of customers instead of pundits, I think these claims are easy to dismiss.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Expo Intensive rocked, the mainstream media has started writing about the Lean Startup, and - most of all - the movement continues to grow and evolve. I went to the conference thinking that I was well grounded in the basics of the Lean Startup approach and that attendance would hone the edges of that understanding.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyers and sellers.) The news from customers was not good.

Customer 240

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 240

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Maybe youd like to start with The lean startup , How to listen to customers , or What does a startup CTO actually do? ) Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. That died with waterfall software development. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small?

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, February 20, 2009 Work in small batches Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches. I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. For software, the easiest batch to see is code. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

This case presents a further complication: desktop software. Without being able transparently modify the software in situ, is it still possible to deploy on a continuous basis? Ive previously named his post Achieving Flow in a Lean Startup as one of my favorite blog posts of 2009. Read on to find out.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 19, 2013

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Our Lean LaunchPad for Life Science class talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them.

Lean 256

Lean Customer Development Video Distribution 256

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Agile Lean 94

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. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

Silicon Valley 253

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue.

Customer 327

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 327

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2013

It’s Lean, it’s fast, it works and it’s unlike anything else ever done. Welcome to the Lean LaunchPad for Life Sciences and Healthcare (part of the National Science Foundation I-Corps ). This post is part of our series on the Lean Startup in Life Science and Health Care. (We If you can’t see the presentation above, click here.

Lean 254

Lean Customer Development Business Model Channel 254

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Please leave feedback!) Do you fix bugs before writing code?

Software Review 144

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 144

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. The software was idiot proof.

Video 184

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 184

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

It became harder and harder to separate how the software is built from how the software is structured. Platform selection and technical design - if your business strategy is to create a low-burn, highly iterative lean startup, youd better be using foundational tools that make that easy rather than hard. I dont think so.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. But its helpful to take a detailed look inside the highly agile process used by Google to ship software. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76