Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Facts are the rock on which you build your strategy and tactics In a startup second-hand facts are almost as useless as opinions. Reply bjorn , on March 23, 2009 at 5:18 pm Said: these stories really livened up the whole concept of “customer discovery&# for me. Now what was the strategy? What did I learn so far?

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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.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. It was fun watching it happen.

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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. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” Me – “Have you used Company x’s product? Do you know have they distribute their product?

Silicon Valley 189

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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. BTW, when the customers were “three-letter” intelligence agencies, contractors used an oblique way of talking about who they were working for: they were all referred to as simply the “customer.”)

Silicon Valley 177

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. Radar engineers had observed if you cut a strip of aluminum foil to 1/2 the wavelength of a radar transmitter and throw it in front of the radars antenna, the radar signal would reflect perfectly. making nothing but jammers to put on our bombers.

Silicon Valley 186

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture.

Silicon Valley 264

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 264

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I’ve paraphrased his speech into the language of a startup. Startups are inherently chaos. Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.) It’s eerily similar.

Silicon Valley 174

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. A final note.

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. The only problem that faces startup investors now is how to mine this new data layer efficiently to increase returns.”. are using AngelMob.co

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

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.)

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news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

Hacker News new | comments | ask | jobs | submit login Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice. I work for a stealth startup. While this may be the case for many startups, this is not true at least in our case. humbledmba.com) 279 points by jaf12duke 216 days ago | comments. niyazpk 215 days ago | link.

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Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.&# (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Historically, these were two guys with high testosterone.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

But in a startup, it is very important to be surrounded by efficient people. PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog).

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Now the Soviets had first hand knowledge of how their air defense systems would work against the nuclear armed B-52G and H models in an operational environment. All as an integral part of the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan – our war-fighting plan to destroy the Soviet Union. 23 to Ann Arbor when the leaves turned in the fall.

Silicon Valley 204

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

My service startup quickly grew and became a platform to identify new problems we could solve for clients. These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Inversely, if you’re using the agency model to fund another startup or product, you should probably keep things lean. Another three came on board 45 days later.

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Later posts will talk about these technologies and the startups that spun out of Stanford to build them. Have they moved to their forward operating bases in the Artic?) But first, to understand what happened at Stanford and in Silicon Valley under Fred Terman, some context about the Cold War is helpful. How many did they have?

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”

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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. Companies specializing in components and systems that operated in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum sprouted faster than fruit trees in the valley orchards.

Silicon Valley 280

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

“And, oh by the way, can you write the manuals for the operators while you’re at it.&# As I poured over the system schematics, I figured out how to put together a course to teach system theory, operations and maintenance. Are You Single?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, January 4, 2009 Sharding for startups The most important aspect of a scalable web architecture is data partitioning. For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. But startups rarely have either luxury. Key-based partitioning.

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San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

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. This is great news not only for the future of our marketing, but for our product development. Photo by Eleaf.

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Customer Analytics Vertical Sales 55

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

And when I wasn’t reading, I was also teaching operations which gave me a pretty good understanding of what we were looking for on the other side. But when the targets lit up, the music and chatter would stop, and the communications would get very professional.

Silicon Valley 273

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

It’s Episode 3 my little “ Loveline for startups. ” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. My co-hosts were Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley , hosts of the well-known Startup Success Podcast.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Funded by military contracts, these 1950′s microwave tube startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment. Navy and the CIA were the primary collectors of tactical and operational ELINT on the Soviet PVO Strany Air Defense system. Why Electronics Intelligence?

Silicon Valley 159

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. No one was confused after that.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

Funded by military contracts these 1950′s startups would help build Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture and environment. To cover all the possible frequencies German radars might be operating on, allied technicians pretuned the jammers before each bomber raid so that each plane transmitted on a different frequency.

Silicon Valley 148

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Being in a startup and having a successful relationship and family was very hard work. Biological Clocks After Convergent and now single again, I was a co-founder of my next two startups; MIPS and Ardent. But entrepreneurs can be great spouses and parents. Our circumstances were unique and your mileage will vary.

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Entrepreneur Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development 332

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching. A match made in heaven? Not exactly. Are You Crazy Enough ?

Vertical 333

Vertical Agile Customer Development Lean 333

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching. Customer Development Teaching' Not exactly.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Vertical Agile Lean 224

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of the Cray-1 , supercomputers were defined as the fastest vector-processing computer , one in which a single instruction performed operations on an array rather than a single number. Cray’s first customers were the U.S.

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