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. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.

North Carolina 129

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 129

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 ?

Silicon Valley 248

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 248

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 268

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 268

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

Using my existing skills and resources (including an old domain name), I tested a productized digital PR offer. 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. Choose to expand vertically or horizontally. Image source ).

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

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. The result is usually hilarious.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 206

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.” Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile.

Silicon Valley 163

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 163

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Since the training department was part of sales no one really paid attention to the four of us. It was a Friday (about ¾’s through my work week) and I was in a sales department meeting. VP of Sales? Life was good.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 195

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. We were constantly creating metrics [.]

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 126

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. We have in our partnership a gent by the name of Barry Fidelman who puts us all to shame with his intensity. The IPO Bubble – August 1995 – March 2000 In August 1995 Netscape went public, and the world of start ups turned upside down.

Silicon Valley 233

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 233

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. All we had to do was tell customers they could get video into their computer – and not promise anything else. You may know it by its final name. We knew something our CEO didn’t.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 180

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

My name is Crystal Williams, and I maintain a small business blog called Babeofbusiness.com. It’s more reference material. Thus, these pages. I’ll add more as time goes on. I am both an avid entrepreneur and book worm but must admit to having not read most of the books on your list. Keep up the great work! … Thanks!

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales. is an AI bot which helps companies refine their sales pitch to VCs. It seamlessly creates a deal folder (company name) in our Google Drive, and notifies us that a new deal has entered the pipeline via Slack. Pitchbot.vc

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

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. How did your skills in sales and marketing and your ability to discover and validate customers run aground at Rocket Science?

Silicon Valley 135

Silicon Valley San Francisco RSS Vertical 135

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.

Silicon Valley 268

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 268

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.) What happened to him?

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 175

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. Before you go to a trade show sales and marketing need to agree to measurable goals. Then offer those budget dollars to the VP of Sales.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 199

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. Me –“That’s a great hypothesis, do customers tell you that they’d buy your version if it was cheaper or on the web? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. I took a deep breath and asked, “Ok, if you were, what percentage of your sales do you think these markets would be in 5 years?” “I guess less than 5%,” was the answer. Customer Development.)

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 196

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. 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. But first some background.)

Silicon Valley 182

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 182

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Some engineers were insulted that we were going to slow down their board and sales was convinced that within days of the board hitting the street we would have a black market in chips to speed up the $699 boards and turn them into $3,999 ones. This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. No one believed it would work.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 143

Software By Rob

JULY 15, 2011

is a tool that helps you edge into customer development. It’s a free tool put together by Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah as a way for product owners to easily survey their customers using pre-written questions. But Analytics tells me that that only 37% of our sales come from search engine traffic. Photo by Eleaf.

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Customer Analytics Vertical Sales 55

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

We already have some competitors in the vertical and while there is no point in trying to hide the actual idea, there are differences in the way we implement stuff that can get us an advantage over the competition. >> There are some other serious reasons why we dont want to go public right now.

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

For those of us selling to businesses however, particularly where there is a sales team involved and a pipeline to track, the world is quite different and Dave’s metrics don’t cover everything you need to track. For long sales cycles, it is important to measure this to estimate marketing ROI for tactics in the short term.

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B2B Metrics Marketing Startup 42