Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 243

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Todd Branchflower took my Lean LaunchPad class having been entrepreneurial enough to convince the Air Force send him to Stanford to get his graduate engineering degree. It was only after returning to Stanford and taking the Lean Launchpad class that I became convinced that a radically different, customer-centric approach was the solution.

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Lean Technical Review Acquisition Software Review 267

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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 257

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. What metrics do we use to see if we learned enough in Customer Discovery ? It’s an impressive portfolio.

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 226

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Each starts inventing and testing their own alternatives about how to sell and position the product.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 231

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0

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Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 290

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

Now at Imperial College Business School and Co-Founder of the Wicked Acceleration Labs , Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking.

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Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 295

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology.

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Lean Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder Channel 120

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference The Lean Startup Conference is next week--and now that we can step back and see all the speakers and mentors, we have to say: Wow. As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 126

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

“We’ve been reading your blog about your Lean Launchpad class.” We want to make a bet that your Lean Launchpad class can apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification. The Innovation Corps – Using the Lean LaunchPad as an Incubator for Scientists and Engineers. Wow, that’s nice, I thought, a call from a fan.

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Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 306

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

– while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells the story of a team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery.

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Lean Security Asia SBIR 406

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

All branches of the military (the Air Force and Army would fund the program as well) wanted Stanford to build prototypes of electronic intelligence and electronic warfare systems that could be put into production by partners in industry. Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab.

Silicon Valley 149

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 149

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley, including those working abroad, often have to retool Lean Startup methods to apply them in places with very different business cultures. On September 24 in the U.S. Here’s what they had to say.

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Silicon Valley Lean Puerto Rico Japan 168

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning™. Before I dive too deeply into the Lean Planning methodology, it makes sense to talk about its history and where it comes from. Lean Planning is born.

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Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

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? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit."

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. At the same time Berkeley was also developing Cold War weapons systems. That has changed in the last few years.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I’ve seen the Valley grow from Sunnyvale to Santa Clara to today where it stretches from San Jose to South of Market in San Francisco. I’ve watched the Valley go from Microwave Valley – to Defense Valley – to Silicon Valley to Internet Valley. So how did this happen? Where is it going?

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 235

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

But to give you a sense of how fast they are moving, it’s only been a week since I posted the syllabus for our new Stanford entrepreneurship class Engr245 ( The Lean Launchpad.) Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad.

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Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 239

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

32 students were scattered across the globe and given a seemingly impossible assignment- they had 10 weeks to understand and then solve a real Dept of Defense problem – by interviewing 100 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, et al while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products – all while never leaving their room.

Oakland 311

Oakland Asia Lean Video 311

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Innovation outposts in Silicon Valley allow big companies to sense and respond to rapid changes in technology. Srivastava leads Verizon’s innovation outpost (their Silicon Valley R&D center) in Palo Alto focusing on building products and services powered by big data and analytics.

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Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

We just finished our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley’s engineering school where many of the teams embedded machine learning technology into their products. Later entrants who miss that wave have to build real products that people want to buy. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.

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Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 322

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Our “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” story played great in Silicon Valley, they ate it up in Hollywood, and the business press tripped over themselves to talk to us. Yet we hadn’t shipped a single product. All this activity occurring before we actually shipped a product.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I set up an advisory board as a vehicle to get these industry experts engaged with the company and product. Velvet Painting Period - MFLOPS Poster Engineers as Marketers There was one other reason I was talent-spotting our advisors and potential customers.

Engineer 214

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 214

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

We tend to associate the government with words like bureaucracy rather than lean innovation. Department of Defense by adopting Lean Methodology inside their agency. To connect to innovation centers outside the agency, their research group has set up “NGA Outpost Valley” (NOV), an innovation outpost in Silicon Valley.

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Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 181

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

We tend to associate the government with words like bureaucracy rather than lean innovation. Department of Defense by adopting Lean Methodology inside their agency. To connect to innovation centers outside the agency, their research group has set up “NGA Outpost Valley” (NOV), an innovation outpost in Silicon Valley.

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Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 181

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 243

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 243

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me. We are currently in the process of validating our hypotheses about our product, customers, and markets. Your results may vary.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 228

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products for the Macintosh. They sold their product through the computer retail channel, something I knew nothing about. They sold to a set of customers I knew nothing about.

Silicon Valley 157

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 157

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

The first few months of my startups were centered around building the founding team, prototyping the product and raising money. This mantra of talking to customers and iterating the product is the basis of the Lean Startup Methodology that Eric Ries has been evangelizing and I’ve been teaching at U.C. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 195

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc. An irreversible decision is firing an employee, launching your product, a five-year lease for an expensive new building, etc. These are usually difficult or impossible to reverse.

Silicon Valley 305

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 305

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures. My blog also allowed me to indulge my interest in a few other subjects: The Secret History of Silicon Valley , thoughts on a career as an entrepreneur, observations about family and startups, etc.

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Silicon Valley Customer Development IP Developer 220

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 223

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.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60