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 424

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 19, 2012

Me : Product definition, use cases, feature list, wireframes, comps, really whatever you have. what format would you and the developer want that in? This should be an iterative process with advisors and customers providing feedback on the product. Founder : Ummm. what do you mean? Founder : Umm. Don't stress over format.

Developer 354

Developer Technical Review Fractional CTO Software Review 354

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Their book “ Business Model Generation ,” is the definitive text on the subject. (And Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. Business Model Design meets Customer Development.

Customer Development 331

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 331

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.

Lean 319

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 319

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

—— When I wrote Four Steps to the Epiphany and the Startup Owners Manual , I believed that Life Sciences startups didn’t need Customer Discovery. For example when one team found the right customer, they changed the core technology (the basis of their original idea!) used to serve those customers.

SBIR 318

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 318

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 216

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 216

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers. We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

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 253

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 253

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 6, 2014

Our Lean LaunchPad class requires student teams to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week while they’re building the product. Our first class session is definitely not a “meet and greet”. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Teaching'

Lean 282

Lean Customer Development Business Model Email 282

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. Founders fit the definition of a creator: they see something no one else does. George Bernard Shaw.

Agile 333

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 333

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. Handspring’s customers understood what a Personal Digital Assistant was.

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 219

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

Lean 259

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 259

ConversionXL

JULY 3, 2014

When was the last time you took a long hard look at what makes your customer base tick? Think customer personas – those detailed representations of the different segments of your target audience. The UK based customer experience management firm, Thunderhead.com, conducted a similar study of U.S.

Customer 133

Customer Analytics Conversion Lead Generation 133

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? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. They are gaining valuable customer data.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Build a product, get it into the real world, measure customers’ reactions and behaviors, learn from this, and use what you’ve learned to build something better. Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

By definition, before they had a chance to fully buy into the idea and the team). With hindsight we should have had “proof of concepts” tested in a corporate center (think ‘pop-up incubator’) where they would do extensive Customer Discovery.

Programming 269

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 269

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies. Some companies definitely should.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures. You most definitely read the book for the content. Raising Money Using Customer Development……… 47. Customer Development Manifesto.

Silicon Valley 227

Silicon Valley Customer Development IP Developer 227

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

ConversionXL

JUNE 19, 2014

As a follow up to our data driven traffic acquisition article , we’re going to be looking at the roles emotion & data play in “activating” customers and using Dave McClure’s Conversion Metrics as a guide to the larger conversation. I’ve definitely seen worse (hello Dolphin Hellas), I’ve also seen better. image source.

Greece 98

Greece Customer eCommerce Design 98

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

To move innovation faster, we now have 21 st century tools — Business Model Canvas , Customer Development , Agile Engineering – all adding up to a Lean Startup. The Lean Definition of the Three Horizons of Innovation. Fast forward to today. We can adapt these startup tools for use inside the corporation.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Lessons to Learn By the time I joined Ardent I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit. Get Out of My Company At the top of his lungs he screamed, “You don’t know a damn thing about what these customers need!

Silicon Valley 282

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 282

Hunter Walker

AUGUST 11, 2022

And definitely once they’re on board fulltime, marketing and comms will be even more valuable. You’re trying to build a software product, do customer development and find PMF. Best Practices In Marking & Comms Are Highly Extensible.

Seed Stage 102

Seed Stage Cap Table Founder Marketing 102

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. This is often B2C because the value is in quantity of customers, and there’s 100x more consumers than businesses. $1/mo simple enough to be self-service). Think: GoDaddy). Again, like shared hosting companies.)

Bootstrapping 294

Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

ConversionXL

JUNE 19, 2014

As a follow up to our data driven traffic acquisition article , we’re going to be looking at the roles emotion & data play in “activating” customers and using Dave McClure’s Conversion Metrics as a guide to the larger conversation. I’ve definitely seen worse (hello Dolphin Hellas), I’ve also seen better. image source.

Greece 82

Greece Customer eCommerce Design 82

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types. Context here.)

Engineer 221

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 221

ConversionXL

JUNE 19, 2014

As a follow up to our data driven traffic acquisition article , we’re going to be looking at the roles emotion & data play in “activating” customers and using Dave McClure’s Conversion Metrics as a guide to the larger conversation. I’ve definitely seen worse (hello Dolphin Hellas), I’ve also seen better. image source.

Greece 107

Greece Customer eCommerce Design 107

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

This person may be an extraordinary communicator, who rallies employees, customers, and colleagues around the vivid future he sees. What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

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. It never happened in any time frame I can remember, and it definitely won’t happen today.

Cost 405

Cost Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media 405

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

After all: Tech support deals with insane customers. Tech support keeps angry customers at bay while having no power to effect change. For most of your customers, tech support is the only human interaction they'll have with you. Enabling your customers isn't just about your product , but rather your entire company.

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

Steve Blank

JANUARY 14, 2014

What was lacking in the article was a clear definition of a Pivot. A pivot may mean you changed your customer segment, your channel, revenue model/pricing, resources, activities, costs, partners, customer acquisition – lots of other things than just the product. Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

Business Model 332

Business Model Lean Customer Development Channel 332

Up and Running

MAY 18, 2016

You’ll learn more about what destroys startups, how to use the Customer Development method to succeed, how to use the Business Model Canvas, how to identify and keep your customers, and how to drive profits. Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy. B y Cindy Alvarez.

Startup 80

Startup Venture Capital Angel Investor Lean 80

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

So, definition: when I talk about a business plan I’m not talking about a 40-page Word document outlining your market approach. That died with waterfall software development. It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you’ll charge for your product. Do so at your peril.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Oh, and we had no installed customer base. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers. So much so, I took a Customer Development approach to my startup, which I wrote up as a Case Study for the Google Group Lean Startup Circle.

Silicon Valley 331

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 331

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2014

0:45: The definition of a startup. 1:49: Use Customer Development to Test Your Hypotheses. 4:24: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers. 0:41: Don’t outsource Customer Discovery. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. And you get a tour of my living room….

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Founder Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 329