Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit).

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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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.

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Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 248

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. Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.). Here’s what we found (Customer Discovery during the week).

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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.

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” 4) You don’t see any revenue gain past three years. 5) The customer’s needs don’t match your long term direction. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I have been working on getting a startup to revenue for a while, and while this is my 4th iteration and I have not yet succeeded, I’ve been learning new things every time. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.” Order Here.

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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.)

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Being in Ohio, which lacks the startup ecosystem of an entrepreneurial cluster like Silicon Valley, made it difficult for Will to get funding for his first startup, Huddlewoo : The type of business that we were building needed an investment of capital ahead of revenue. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

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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.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. They never understood Market Type. End result?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

a new type of graphics architecture, or a new communications chip architecture) mean you may not know if the chip performs as well as you thought until you get first silicon. These two numbers have direct impact on revenue and financial health. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. Order Here.

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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. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

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. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

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. What’s been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a “playbook.” Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Luckily (or maybe because we were in Silicon Valley where there was a domain expert for everything) there was a very smart consultant in the retail computer space, Seymour Merrin, who preached about the importance of packaging. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. We thought we figured it out.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. We thought we figured it out.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

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.

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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.) Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development. I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present.

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Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 318

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. Quickly iterate the product in front of customers. Here’s why.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The old rules of sustainable revenue and consistent profitability went out the window.

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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 271

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 271

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Over time the idea that winners in new markets are the ones who have been the first (not just early) entrants into their categories became unchallenged conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. Google is a $25 billion dollar company with most of its revenue from AdWords. Implicit Customer Discovery and Validation in Fast Followers.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

At Stanford, Ann Miura-Ko and I have been working on a simplified Silicon Valley version of this model. Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. More in future posts.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

. - Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. Two studies have shown that only about 10 percent of promoters actually refer profitable new customers.

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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. Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money). Yet this system isn’t perfect. – seems like another planet.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 176

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

We were depending on investor funding, but with $60,000 in revenue no one would fund it. . When Peggy first arrived in Silicon Valley, she worked for Boole & Babbage , before founding her own firm. Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies.

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Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

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. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

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.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals.

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

It’s a process that doesn’t exist in large companies with existing customers and markets. I call this process “Customer Development,” a sibling to “Product Development,” and each and every startup that succeeds recapitulates it, knowingly or not. But it is life and death for a new venture. Looked up for a kindle edition.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 127

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2011

Years later this area would become known as Silicon Valley. But I learned that in Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience. In 1999… with the company’s revenue north of $100 million…I handed the keys to a new CEO and left. My third story is about Failure and Redemption.

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