Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation - how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.). Hawken students practicing Customer Discovery in a mall.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

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

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 inevitable failures then damaged returns.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

We think teaching teams a formal methodology around the Lean Framework (Business Model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) is a natural evolution of how successful incubators/accelerators will build startups. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. Here’s how that happened.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 219

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

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

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 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

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

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 21, 2012

The “it” is a physical or web product they’ve often been locked-down, pounding away at, for many weeks. Use Customer Development to identify and refine the potential profitable niche and stay in close contact with customers as you build, to be sure you’re building something they’ll want to have…and keep.

Startup 332

Startup Cofounder Customer Development Viral 332

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

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. We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

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

MARCH 2, 2011

Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world. Corporate elephants can dance.

Silicon Valley 222

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 222

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

There are now examples of business model presentations on the web. Filed under: Customer Development Manifesto , Durant versus Sloan: Startups Verus Companies , Teaching. Tags: Customer Development Manifesto Durant versus Sloan: Startups Verus Companies Teaching.

Business Plan 312

Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 312

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2012

Filed under: Air Force , Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture. Unless you’ve had a ton of experience (which includes failing) in a broad range of areas you’re only guessing. Great careers start by peeling potatoes.

Thailand 331

Thailand Engineer Customer Development SEO 331

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. I think these guys have gone a long way to turn hypotheses about early-stage Internet startups into facts.

Technical Cofounder 333

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 333

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

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

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

APRIL 4, 2011

talk to more customers? cold calls, in-person interviews, and a web survey. (We They learned that one their core customer hypothesis about their buyers, “startups would want to buy computing capacity on a “spot market” was wrong. Startups were actually happy with Amazon Web Services. outside of Stanford.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

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 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. Berkeley and at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

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

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

FEBRUARY 9, 2012

In fact, you could say that all that remains from my last book are the four steps of Customer Development. Integrates Alexander Osterwalders “Business Model Canvas” as the front-end and “scorecard” for the customer discovery process. Provides separate paths and advice for web/mobile products versus physical products.

Entrepreneur 289

Entrepreneur Lean Business Model Customer Development 289

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Perhaps in direct proportion to the number of “freemium” and “eyeballs” web deals funded.) It may be that the venture business will have to return to the old days of helping entrepreneurs build companies – not hype them, not spin them, but actually make them worth something to customers and investors.

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

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

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

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

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development. Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development' Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry. If your country doesn’t have that you need to be born global.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

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

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

An early indication that you’ve found the right business model is when you believe the cost of getting customers will be less than the revenues the customers will generate. For web startups, this is when the cost of customer acquisition is less than the lifetime value of that customer. Customer Acquisition.

Balance Sheet 298

Balance Sheet Startup Burn Rate Metrics 298

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