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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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

JANUARY 6, 2011

And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about who I worked for (and the names of agencies.). Second, to share how my how my thinking about entrepreneurship as a distinct practice and how Customer Development as one of its central components has evolved over the last decade.

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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

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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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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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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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

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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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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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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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. And venture capital and entrepreneurship has made life even tougher for the modern corporation. If you drop the sentimentality, a company is a merely a brand-name for a historical context. Agilent is a $5.8

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? Durant Versus Sloan – Part 1 « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1 – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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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.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. Customer Development.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand. They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not just my students) is that Customer Development means getting out of the building and sharing what you are working on. I just found out that someone stole my idea today and also is using my name with “The&# in front of it. Once it almost mattered.

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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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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

My partner had convinced several major Hollywood names that this was the inevitable consequence of the merger of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Don’t confuse your passion for your tools with why your customers will buy your product. We believed that by putting full motion video (i.e. And at the time it was a plausible scenario.)

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Reply Greg Moreno , on August 7, 2009 at 8:26 pm Said: I came here looking for tips, ideas, and inspirations for entrepreneurs but now I am more interested in your war and spy stories Reply YA , on September 8, 2009 at 5:49 pm Said: Steve: you may wish to know that PVO Strany is not an official name, it is a journalistic term.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

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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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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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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

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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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

He replied, ‘They were found in the ‘name of system I should have absolutely no knowledge or access to’ manuals. he asked me. This the one of the very few times I’ve been, really, really impressed. I said, “Why yes they are, where did you get them?” Were you reading those?” I said, “Absolutely.”

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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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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

How delightful it would be to have a presidential candidate named Frost. Martin , on July 23, 2009 at 6:54 am Said: I’m a big Frost fan. One must know one’s self and one must know the future. Very few of us do. However, if the choice works out well, one can retrospectively write a poem about it. Pols love ambiguity.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. In an existing or resegmented market, this may include branding and product line extensions. In most markets, “first mover advantage&# is illusorily; fast followers often win.

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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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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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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!

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