Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

These weren’t 22-year olds who wanted to build a social shopping web site. We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This methodology forces rapid hypothesis testing and Customer Development by getting out of the building while building the product.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

They’re used to using the web and increasingly the mobile web for everything, commerce, communication, games, etc. While there are 564 million web users with 420 million having mobile web access, 74% of Chinese Internet users make less than $500/month and are students, blue-collar workers or jobless. Unlike U.S.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital. Congratulations. Download the full Startup Genome report here. ——-.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

A business plan is the execution document that large companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. There are now examples of business model presentations on the web. Filed under: Customer Development Manifesto , Durant versus Sloan: Startups Verus Companies , Teaching.

Business Plan 312

Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 312

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. What Do VC’s Do?

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

Draw Your Ideas - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 16, 2010 I saw Jack Dorsey give this talk at The 99% Conference last month. The Yin and Yang of Product and Engineering - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , May 22, 2010 For a tech company, product and engineering are the heart and soul of the business.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

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

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.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

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. They never understood Market Type. . Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference?

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

Clay stressed that crowdfunding should not replace Customer Discovery: … Customer Development and Customer Discovery need to be moved earlier – before you launch. Because Lean Startup methods, Crowdfunding, Amazon Web Services and the Internet that connects us all, is bringing the cost of failure to zero. .

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

As part of a small web dev shop, it’s harder to explain to the business people why XYZ can or cannot function as they want when they don’t understand my area of expertise, but it is easy to explain to the client why our products will help them do their job better because of my domain experience.

Engineer 198

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. China Venture Capital. If it’s driven by profit then the ecosystem needs both entrepreneurs as well as Venture Finance. China has the biggest Venture Capital industry outside the U.S. Entrepreneurship in Beijing.

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 267

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. It is web-based, fast and easy and soon to may be available on the iPhone. Good stuff too.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. Electron-based Venture Capital. Here’s why.

Lean 258

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 258

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Brendan McManus said: “Lessons Learned” – A New Type of Venture Capital Pitch [link] #startup #advice [.] Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me. Your results may vary.

Venture Capital 209

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 209

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Lets take venture capital and grow this thing into a real business.”. Typically the size of their opportunity and company doesn’t lend itself to attracting venture capital. The Web and Startups. Herein lies the confusion; not every business on the web can scale big. The Scalable Startup.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 276

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2011

Venture Capital ; met with the local hardware/software venture capital firm. Incubators : toured the TechArb , the engineering student accelerator, and the Michigan Venture Center in the University’s Tech Transfer Office. You Can’t Start a Fire Without A Spark – A Lack of Venture Capital.

Michigan 307

Michigan Silicon Valley Venture Capital Incubator 307

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

Ann who had been my Teaching Assistant while she had finished her PhD at Stanford felt the same frustration about teaching entrepreneurs to assemble a business plan that we knew in the real world wouldn’t survive first contact with customers. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner.

Business Model 226

Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 226

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Here’s why.

Venture Capital 297

Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 297

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

APRIL 13, 2013

The previous post described the evolution of the Chinese Venture Capital system. China Venture Capital. If it’s driven by profit then the ecosystem needs both entrepreneurs as well as Venture Finance. China has the biggest Venture Capital industry outside the U.S. Entrepreneurship in Beijing.

Silicon Valley 159

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 159

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. link] a few seconds ago from web [.] You’re not joining a big company.

Cofounder 219

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

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.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 14, 2013

“The results of programs like 500 Startups, Techstars, and Y-Combinator are well known, but due to the culture here in Europe there’s still a lot of unknowns in terms of the track record for follow on funding and results of accelerator programs based in Europe,” says Don Ritzen, co-founder and CEO of Rockstart Accelerator.

Silicon Valley 231

Silicon Valley Europe Venture Capital Incubator 231

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Ignore This Post The same caveat applies as in the first post; If you’re selling via the web, and trade shows seem hopelessly anachronistic, ignore this post. Why are you saying that “If you’re selling via the web and trade shows are something your grandfather told you about, ignore this post.&#. this may be a useful read.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

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.)

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

The Next Web

MAY 4, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. Previously, he worked in venture capital in Europe. You can check out his blog and follow him on Twitter.

San Francisco 159

San Francisco Europe Technical Review Due Diligence 159

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

It surely lifted my spirits once again in my quest to seek funding from venture capitalists and to keep silencing my critics and proving them that i can achieve my milestones and goals in my very ambitious web application. I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. Thanks Steve!

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

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

JULY 28, 2011

The combination of Venture Capital and technology entrepreneurship is one of the great business inventions of the last 50 years. They’ll explore the best way to deliver the product to customers, the resources required, as well as competing technologies. See the NSF web page here.

Engineer 278

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 278

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

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. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.),

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

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

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms. my startup is Blank Label (www.blank-label.com), which is a provider of custom dress shirts that empowers consumers to become the designer of their own product.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Over time, open source software the rise of the next wave of web startups and the embrace of Agile Engineering meant that startups no longer needed millions of dollars to buy specialized computers and license expensive software – they could start a company on their credit cards. Filed under: Technology , Venture Capital.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. Silicon Valley, New York). Here’s how. Because We’ve Always Done It This Way.

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 290

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

The combination of Venture Capital and technology startups is only about 50 years old. Rather than invent a new form of corporate governance, venture investors adopted the traditional board meeting structure from large corporations. Silicon Valley, New York). Here’s how. Because We’ve Always Done It This Way.

Silicon Valley 258

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 258