Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers. VP of Sales – “Sure.”

Burn Rate 250

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 250

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. Set up the Lean LaunchLab or a WordPress blog to document your Customer Development progress. Size the market opportunity.

Lean 334

Lean Web Coder Business Model 334

Steve Blank

JANUARY 2, 2014

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter : Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Lessons Learned.

Lean 246

Lean Algorithm Customer Development IP 246

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Given Stanford’s 10 week quarters, we planned for eight weeks of lecture and the last two weeks for team final presentations.

Lean 303

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 303

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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that. Lets see why.

Lean 253

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 253

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

Customer Development 221

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 221

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

That died with waterfall software development. I’m not even talking about your 12-page Powerpoint presentation that you need to raise venture capital or to talk with potential biz dev partners. Let’s take your revenue line. How will your costs scale as your revenue scales. Or lower revenue assumptions.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

Present at the Creation. We didn’t know it at the time, but with that investment we had paid for front-row VIP seats to witness the origins of Customer Development and the Lean Startup. Truth be told, we took a page out of Frank Rimalovski’s playbook at NYU and paid for Yang Tao to attend the Lean LaunchPad Educators Program.

Maryland 277

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 277

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Luckily Alexander Osterwalder’s business model canvas presents a visual overview of the nine components of a business on one page. They are: value proposition, product/service the company offers (along with its benefits to customers). customer segments, such as users and payers or moms or teens.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

For ambitious agencies, taking an MVP approach can unlock incredibly lucrative revenue streams. However, it did communicate everything a potential client needed to know and was responsible for my first $9,000 in monthly recurring revenue. These statistics present facts, but painful ones. Complication. and had the same effect.

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 225

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. the Customer Life Time (CLT)).

Customer 326

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 326

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

Finally to have a better chance of a viable enterprise, they need to test all the other hypotheses in their business/mission model (pricing, demand creation, revenue, costs, etc.). The key principles of customer development are: There are no facts inside the building so get the heck outside. Customer behavior changes?

Customer 418

Customer Business Model Restful Video 418

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users."

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

The news from customers was not good. The Nine Teams Present. Each side of a market has it’s own Value Proposition, Customer Segment and Revenue Model.) They learned that one their core customer hypothesis about their buyers, “startups would want to buy computing capacity on a “spot market” was wrong.

Customer 238

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 238

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 19, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter –Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Watch their Lesson Learned presentation below.

Lean 255

Lean Customer Development Video Distribution 255

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

At NextView we invest across the spectrum of seed stage companies so roughly 1/3rd of the companies we invest in are pre-product, roughly 1/3rd are post-product but pre-revenue, and perhaps 1/3rd have some very early revenue. You’re obviously not showing charts of user growth, number of customers, or revenue.

Seed Stage 149

Seed Stage B2B Seed Capital Revenue 149

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present. Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development. SalesStash.

Artificial Inteligence 322

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 322

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

1) It all starts from the Growth Hacking Funnel - in the early stages, startups should not just focus on top/bottom line metric like unique users and revenue. They should understand the different states of the user (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue) and focus on moving users from one state to the next. Distribution Hacks.

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. If you can’t see the presentation click here. If you can’t see the presentation click here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. If you can’t see the presentation click here. If you can’t see the presentation click here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter – Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences.

Lean 254

Lean Customer Development Business Model Channel 254

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

Oakland 329

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 329

ConversionXL

JUNE 14, 2021

They developed features with their specific audience in mind. million in monthly recurring revenue (at time of writing). It allows customers to peer in and find out if what you’re offering is for them—and if they should stick around to learn more. How do they present their features? What’s the packaging like?

Software Review 158

Software Review Audience Differentiation Framework 158

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination. Yet year after year, decade after decade, VC’s would watch as no startup business plan survived first contact with customers. It takes a ton of face-face customer interactions.

Business Model 266

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 266

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 324

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 324

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Secondly, each student team will present “lessons learned” from their team’s experience getting out of the building learning, testing, iterating and/or pivoting their business model. So what did you do?

Wiki 315

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 315

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He presented the idea at the TED conference in the mid 90′s and was literally boo’d while he was on stage. I thing I’ve learned over the years is that technology purists hate advertising even when it is that revenue stream that truthfully drives much of our industry. Overture (Goto.com).

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

So when it came time to start their next company the starting questions was, “OK, what big problem could we solve for local TV broadcasters?&# They’re taking on the declining revenue streams of local TV and creating new, measurable ad activities. So the whole customer development cycle is very streamlined.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) In fact, for decades if you drew this diagram on day one of a startup VC’s would nod sagely and everyone would get to work heading to first customer ship. The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption.

Burn Rate 250

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 250

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. We thought we figured it out. We assumed we had product-market fit and all we had to do was keep selling. The problem was had the wrong business model at the time.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 145

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter –Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Watch their Lesson Learned presentation below.

Lean 244

Lean Customer Development IP Agile 244

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 281

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 281

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. We thought we figured it out. We assumed we had product-market fit and all we had to do was keep selling. The problem was had the wrong business model at the time.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

The City Tour events would bring his customers together with prospects and a few other interesting people for presentations and group discussion. Benioff found that buyers were much less interested in hearing from him than they were in talking to his customers — their peers, other software programmers like themselves.

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234