Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? Reminder: What’s the Point of Talking to Customers ?

Customer 413

Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyers and sellers.) The news from customers was not good. talk to more customers? Which value added services do public clouds want to attract customers for?

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about 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. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 420

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2020

As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. While there’s agreement that companies need to adapt to changing markets, rapidly find new markets, new customers and new revenue models, the question is how ? Accounts receivables are stretching way out.

Customer 436

Customer Marketing Customer Development Lean 436

Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2010

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. We used what they learned to plan their next steps for additional Discovery, and ultimately Customer Validation.

Customer Development 235

Customer Development Developer Customer South America 235

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. Let’s Fire Our Customers Part of the DNA of great entrepreneurs is a bias towards decisive and immediate action. Get it done, now.

Customer 195

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

I think customer feedback comes in a very unstructured manner, hence it is difficult to apply an algorithm on it. to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. Order Here.

Customer Development 124

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. The class has talked to ~2,200 customers to date.

Customer 323

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.”

Vertical 144

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 11, 2021

As an entrepreneur at times you forget that being in charge doesn’t mean you have to know everything. When it feels like you’re trapped facing an unsolvable dilemma, and wrestling with a seemingly intractable problem, remember that “getting out of your head” is the personal equivalent of the Lean Startup mantra “get out of the building.”.

Customer 395

Customer Lean Entrepreneur Internet 395

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

When scientists and engineers who’ve been working in the lab for years try to commercialize their technology they often get trapped by their own beliefs - including who the customers are, what features are important, pricing etc. While they’ve been in the lab they had a target customer in mind. Here’s what happened.

Customer 287

Customer Lean Matching Business Model 287

Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Our first question was, did the total number of customers that had already bought products from our competitors and us represent a saturated market or the tip of the iceberg? Since I was heading a marketing department, not acting as an individual contributor, I needed to teach all of marketing the importance of customer data.

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 134

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

I was having coffee with the CEO of a new startup, listening to her puzzle through how to communicate to potential customers. I reminded her that all the Lean tools she learned in class–Customer Discovery, business model and value proposition canvases– contained her answer. Painful and invaluable” was her reply. Here’s how.

Marketing 310

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. He got my attention when he said, “following your customer development stuff is making my company fail.” We Did Everything Customers Asked For. “We Five Cups of Coffee.

Customer 325

Customer Business Model Customer Development Startup 325

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

Agile is a tremendous advance in reducing time, money and wasted product development effort – and in having products better match customer needs. And these changes may have unintended consequences leading to customer dissatisfaction and confusion. Waterfall – The Customer View. Continuous Delivery/Deployment – The Customer View.

Continuous Deployment 329

Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 329

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies. So we’ve learned to live with our customers. Build continuous customer discovery into your company DNA. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Technology. Crop Dusters.

Customer 316

Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 316

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 11, 2023

Most of the machines were custom-built to crack a specific code, and increasingly used a new ERA invention – the magnetic drum memory to process and analyze the coded texts. ERAs systems were designed to solve problems defined by their Navy code-breaking customer. They wanted ERA to get its government customers.

Minnesota 281

Minnesota Engineer Minneapolis Silicon Valley 281

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers. So by popular demand, here’s a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto. Not All Startups Are Alike.

Customer Development 328

Customer Development Developer Customer Cofounder 328

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 12, 2012

Filed under: Customer Development. Thanks to: Alexis Finch, Sketchnotes / UX Research Consultant @agentfin.

Customer Development 309

Customer Development Developer Customer 309

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 14, 2014

If you can’t see the video click here Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development. Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

Business Plan 317

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 317

Steve Blank

JUNE 28, 2014

If you can’t see the video click here Filed under: 2 Minute Lessons , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. 2 Minute Lessons Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Teaching'

Customer 313

Customer Search Lean Business Model 313

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. Customer Discovery. He worked hard to deeply understand the customer problems of these two customer segments.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2019

They have a unique insight about the nature of interactions between customers and service providers I’ve never heard before. If they are correct, they’ve found a unique combination of customers and value proposition that made these customers want to immediately pay and repeatably engage. Why did those fail?

Bandwidth 281

Bandwidth Database Venture Capital Demand 281

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2024

One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering team. And it went great. What did I do wrong?

Founder 325

Founder Engineer Sales Conversion 325

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2022

And they figure out how they could digitally enable their business – supply chain, customer interactions, etc. They explore and analyze data using machine learning platforms to create models about customers, processes, risks, or whatever they’re trying to predict. Making business smarter : Customer Support. What’s Different?

Artificial Inteligence 417

Artificial Inteligence Software Review Algorithm Technical Review 417

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 15, 2010

Filed under: Customer Development. While I was teaching at Columbia in New York in November I was interviewed for the Shoshin Project by my friend Christian Jorg.

Customer Development 269

Customer Development Developer Customer New York 269

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.). Customer Discovery in the Real World. This was a huge learning moment.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us? It’s your vision damn it!

Customer Development 230

Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

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. Business Model Design meets Customer Development.

Customer Development 329

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 329

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2023

The studio’s internal team builds the minimal viable product, then validates an idea by finding product/market fit and early customers. If the idea passes a series of “Go/No Go” decisions based on milestones for customer discovery and validation, the studio recruits entrepreneurial founders to run and scale those startups.

Technical Cofounder 346

Technical Cofounder Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 346

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.).

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. Activities define the unique expertise your company needs to deliver the value proposition, customers, channels, customer relationships and/or revenue. (If Customer Development'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. He went through his product feature by feature and matched them to the customer problems. It certainly sounded like he had done a great job of Customer Discovery. Have you heard it personally from the customers?”.

Forecast 270

Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 270

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. Given something tangible, customers were able to start gauging their willingness to use and pay. Wireframes.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315