Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 Today it’s dominated by capital efficient software, web and mobile startups whereas 10 years ago it was dominated by semiconductor and hardware startups that consumed huge amounts of capital before their first dollar in revenue. The Bend Experience.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

It worked like a charm since we could create a more interactive experience on the Web. What started out as a generic web-based chat solution morphed into a full-fledged product for a distance education that we called iClass. (We We were a tiny web-conferencing startup in Pittsburgh called iMeet. This time we’d gotten it right.

Revenue 72

Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

We realized that past K-12 Entrepreneurial classes taught students “the lemonade stand” version of how to start a company: 1) come up with an idea, 2) execute the idea, 3) do the accounting (revenue, costs, etc.). These two startups served as the students’ introduction to customer development methodology.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Customer Segments change over time. I-Corps @ NIH Lecture Order Details.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

LAMP ) emerged for building web servers. It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. One of the key tenets of Customer Development is that your business model is nothing more than a set of untested hypotheses.

Customer Development 329

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 329

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

I remember going to an Under the Radar conference in 2006 in the heat of the Web 2.0 There were tons of young entrepreneurs showing their latest Web 2.0 Unfortunately this was reinforced by the many conferences that rushed to espouse the benefits of Web 2.0 Cisco and others went out to fill out their Web 2.0 portfolios.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2011

Max and his team built a website called the Startup Genome Compass (their benchmarking web site) that allows an Internet startup to evaluate their business performance. The Startup Genome Compass uses a hybrid “Stage and Type&# model that describes how startups progress through their business development lifecycle.

Software Review 292

Software Review Early Stage Technical Review Startup 292

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 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

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. – not just web-based startups. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. These don’t require coding skills—they’re usually visual templates that are easy to use but don’t allow for great customization (that would require technical skills). Custom development. WordPress DIY.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

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?

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. Now you can do it for free, or a few hundred dollars, with one of the many web building tools available, like Shopify or Weebly.

Cost 405

Cost Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media 405

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

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 217

Silicon Valley Technical Review IPO Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

talk to more customers? cold calls, in-person interviews, and a web survey. (We Each side of a market has it’s own Value Proposition, Customer Segment and Revenue Model.) Startups were actually happy with Amazon Web Services. outside of Stanford. Others would find reality crashing down harder a bit later.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

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

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 31, 2011

Steve Blank is a retired serial entrepreneur, educator, thought leader and creator of the rigorous "Customer Development" methodology detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany." 93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold. Happy birthday Max.

Software Review 134

Software Review Early Stage Startup Technical Review 134

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. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

In contrast to Waterfall development, Agile Development delivers incremental and iterative changes on an ongoing basis. Agile development has upended the familiar consumer expectations and company revenue models designed around the release cycles of Waterfall engineering. Customer Development Marketing Tesla'

Continuous Deployment 329

Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 329

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Their objective is to get users, orders, customers, etc. and if a web-based product, a minimum feature set,) all delivered in 10 weeks. Class 1 Jan 4 th Intro/Business Model/Customer Development.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

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 247

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

ConversionXL

JANUARY 31, 2014

What follows is a list of resources that can be applied specifically to landing page optimization, found here on ConversionXL & from other great websites around the web. note: If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use customer development questions for your page to resonate with future traffic). image source.

Analytics 134

Analytics Video Matching Conversion 134

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I had been confused for years why I had to update an income statement each board meeting that said zero for 18 months before we had any revenue. As a founder you are testing a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? If you are following Customer Development , the answer is easy.

Balance Sheet 298

Balance Sheet Startup Burn Rate Metrics 298

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

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. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development. Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

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. Intel realized this when its initial forays into web-based and social media marketing were going nowhere.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

New Century, New Channels For many of you reading this, boxes sitting on a retail shelf may seem hopelessly outdated, but the same marketing lessons hold for “award winning&# web sites or social media. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) What did we learn?

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. With Netscape’s IPO , there was suddenly a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

When the results were compared with ordinary product development projects at 3M, the differences were dramatic: Lead-user innovations achieved average revenue of $146 million in their fifth year, compared with $18 million for internally generated innovations. They need to get creative about bringing customers into these programs.

Customer 158

Customer Social Media Retention Canada 158

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. When I asked him if he actually had personally left the building and talked to these potential customers, or even had gotten them on the phone, he sounded confused. Customer needs are non-deterministic.

Metrics 239

Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 239

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Lean Continuous Deployment 60

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Now with customers and early revenue, it was out raising its first round of venture money. Their primary goal is a predictable revenue stream for the owner, with reasonable risk and reasonable effort and without the need to bring in world-class engineers and managers. The Web and Startups.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Expo SF (May. .

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

Intellectual Property 175

Intellectual Property Aggregator Startup IP 175

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2011

One of the amazing consequences of the low cost of creating web and mobile apps is that you can get a lot of them up and running simultaneously and affordably. I call these app development projects “science experiments.”. The web now allows you to turn your “back of the napkin&# ideas into live experiments.

Entrepreneur 267

Entrepreneur Web Demand Customer Development 267