Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. Her packaging class was so good that we sent every new marketer at SuperMac to take it.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? No, not really.

Silicon Valley 149

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 149

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. Ultimately you want to see if you can find customers and a market for the product as specified – as early as possible.

Vertical 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

Customer Development 251

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

Technology 141

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Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. steve Customer Development is Hard. « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on May 5, 2009 at 3:55 pm Said: [.] Order Here.

Customer Development 147

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

At the same time we were educating the press , we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 267

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.)

North Carolina 128

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

Customer Development 266

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 266

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. What happened?

Silicon Valley 137

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) ———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show. .

Silicon Valley 132

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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. His enthusiastic response was, “This will revolutionize marketing departments!”

Silicon Valley 243

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 243

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. For me this was one of the joys of entrepreneurship – constant learning and new insights.

Customer 210

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 210

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

To do this they have to accomplish five things; 1) get deal flow – via networking and legwork, they identify likely industries, companies and teams with the potential for rapid growth (less than 10 years), 2) evaluate those companies and teams on the basis of technology, market opportunity, and team.

Silicon Valley 230

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Scalable startups are on a trajectory for a billion dollar market cap. 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. has a large enough market that most U.S. ———-.

Global 335

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. I walked into the VP of Sales’ office and with my knees trembling, I politely asked for the job. What’s Marketing? For entrepreneurs good things come to those who ask.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. 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.

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 125

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

This is the first way to get video into a computer, we’re going to sell and market this board like there’s no tomorrow. People who aren’t current customers of our graphics boards will get to know our company and brand. We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force.

Video 176

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 176

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.” Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. I was just in marketing.

Customer Development 283

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

The extreme example of this are algorithmic investors in the public markets, who design algorithms which trade on the designer’s behalf, as opposed to making trading decisions directly. High-frequency trading, algorithmic by its nature, is estimated to account for at least 50% of US equity markets trading volume. . 1) Market fund.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

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. None of mine did.)

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 267

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

However, in catching up with the VP of Sales of Ardent last night, I was reminded one of the few times I did return for closure. In my career I’ve been involved with lots of sales deals, and for some reason losing this was the one deal I never forgot. It was for sale on Ebay. I liked to fail fast, move on, and not look back.

Silicon Valley 201

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources.

Silicon Valley 194

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 194

A Crowded Space

AUGUST 20, 2015

They will need to do tons of customer development. The sales and marketing channels will be complete guesses - trying lots of different things to see what works. Once the product / market fit is established and acquisition channels are better understood, the startup can enter the next phase.

Vertical 60

Vertical Channel Acquisition Metrics 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” 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. We only have 20 customers, and Large Company x has millions.”

Silicon Valley 197

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 197

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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

Lean 257

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 257

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

It didn’t make my marketing skills any worse or better, but moved me to play forever on a different field. If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. But that job is changing dramatically, and this brings us to the next major problem facing traditional media organizations: Media companies are failing at marketing. There are too many products clamoring for attention.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 424

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.) car market.

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 170

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Reply Customer Development and Start-up Models « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on March 26, 2009 at 3:06 am Said: [.] But I wrote a post about an iterative, process-oriented approach to high-tech sales and marketing on 2.9.9. I’ll try to mix the topics up during the week.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand. We were happily brainstorming when one of his managers spoke up and said, “Well, the phrase ‘Big Dogs’ might not work because it might not translate well in our Mexican and Spanish markets.”

Silicon Valley 191

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 191

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. It would have been easy for marketing to skip all of this and just write a set of benchmarks that made us look good. It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price.

Silicon Valley 125

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

I put together a one-page website, a list of 100 people to reach out to, and a cold email script that would make seasoned sales professionals cringe. Today, Grizzle is a full-service content marketing and SEO agency that provides B2B and SaaS companies end-to-end services. What other content marketing challenges are you facing?”

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

It may not be for you.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley Iraq RSS Vietnam 179

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

While I was waiting in the lobby to pick up my offer letter, the head of marketing communications (who was to be one of my direct reports) came up to me as I held my just signed employment agreement. OK, let’s start with the basics, who does marketing think our customers are?” The obvious one’s were who were they?

Silicon Valley 201

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