Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products for the Macintosh. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This required convincing software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. – was his job.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Driving across the U.S. I was stunned.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I’m a software engineer by trade, so I’m always interested in some better way to do things, whether they are in software or in business processes or organizations. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.”

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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. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

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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

OCTOBER 5, 2009

The culture and work ethic of Convergent had earned it the title “the Marine Corps of Silicon Valley”. Never mind The first idea for our new company was a software product that looked something like Hypertext. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Only then did I realize we both forgot to ask.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I grabbed one of each piece of literature, stuffed into my bag, and wandered through the exhibit hall looking at other hardware and petroleum software companies. Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.] Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

For this startup we had assembled some of the best and brightest hardware and software engineers in the computer industry. Customer development isn’t just for [.] Reply Customer Development Oriented Lead Developer for Start-up – EventSession , on November 9, 2009 at 4:27 pm Said: [.]

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. The software was idiot proof.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

But we knew something they didn’t; the total available market for color graphics boards was measurable by looking at an adjacent market, the color desktop publishing software market. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. I’ve learned so much! Thanks for sharing! Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S.

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

There couldn’t have been a worse choice for CEO in Silicon Valley. Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley was an Oxymoron A key premise of our new company was that our video compression and authoring technology would revolutionize how games were made and played. This wasn’t just some random Silicon Valley fantasy.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that.

Vertical 128

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours. Thanks for sharing! Order Here.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? And since the card was useless without any application software, what other software products did they use on it? The percentage of marketing departments to live in the ivory tower rather than get out to meet with customers has got to be staggeringly high.

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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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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. Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference? Thank you for your great book.

Customer Development 196

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. this may be a useful read. Write it down and keep it in a tradeshow handbook for those who will follow. Go to trade shows like it matters. Order Here.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. I recently completed the Validation step (less the industry analyst presentations) and am ready to move on to Customer Creation. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. So the ask is made — shall it be given?

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

However, I’ve seen this story repeated time and again, and not just in Silicon Valley. Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / 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. Coming next Part 2: What’s Wrong with Product Development as a Model? It may have been true that years ago software was different. Very thought provoking.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

And during the Cold War it sat side by side with commercial firms in Silicon Valley, with its nondescript sign on the front lawn. I left ESL and the black world for a career in startups; semiconductors, supercomputers, consumer electronics, video games and enterprise software. All You Can Read Without a Library Card It was 1978.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets , and with my team of vertical marketers , I thought I had achieved absolution and redemption. But there was one fatal flaw. Order Here.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Traveling around the country had helped me begin to understand how these customers currently did their work, what journals they read, where they got their funding, what other software they ran on their machines, etc. I came back to the company and described the day-in-the-life of each type of customer. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

military realized that our advantage over the Soviet Union was in silicon, software and systems. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. ESL – National Technical Means of Verification The project I was working on at ESL fit this category. These technologies which allowed the U.S. Order Here.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Out of Stanford Business School she went to work for Apple as an evangelist and then joined Ansa Software , the developer of Paradox, a Mac-database. Most Silicon Valley startups have great policies for having your dog at work but not your kids.) My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Most publishers are still caught up in an outdated “vision vs. metrics&# argument, which is already obsolete here in Silicon Valley. The world is generally not as tech-savvy as Silicon Valley and will continue to rely on traditional mechanisms for content distribution for the foreseeable future.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2009

I will admit that taking a concept such as “open source” from the software business and applying it to the auto industry and Washington D.C. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. with the auto bailout. Economies of scale will drop component costs (read batteries) over time. (I Order Here. Now In Print!

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