Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

Burn Rate 249

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 249

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley. The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Perhaps it’s the weather.

China 324

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 324

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 147

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Entrepreneurs beyond Silicon Valley, including those working abroad, often have to retool Lean Startup methods to apply them in places with very different business cultures. Those conversations can often circle around the difficulties of entrepreneurship outside Silicon Valley. On September 24 in the U.S.

Silicon Valley 168

Silicon Valley Lean Puerto Rico Japan 168

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. 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.

Customer Development 220

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley. The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Perhaps it’s the weather.

China 216

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 216

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “. Talented product developers. No one can truly understand your customers or genuinely share their interests unless she is a customer herself. Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

He’s as good as any startup CEO in Silicon Valley. 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. And they’ve being doing this while driving product cost down and performance up.

Silicon Valley 228

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 228

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. It’s much easier to just steal their ideas and hire their employees. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. In the U.S.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 269

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

As the emeritus Chief Technology Officer of the United States, he still connects government and Silicon Valley. He’ll talk about making a profit and making a difference in a conversation with New Media Ventures’ Christie George. Todd Park convened the team that saved Obamacare.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Nayeem explained why: Building a hardware product standalone is very, very difficult because you have to deal with supply chain, you have to deal with customer service, you have to deal with fulfillment. … Hire around you to fill those weak spots. …. Every time I go to Silicon Valley I’m like, “Oh, this place is great.”

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

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 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

The culture and work ethic of Convergent had earned it the title “the Marine Corps of Silicon Valley”. Supercomputers get Personal Back in Sunnyvale my friend had not only been hired but had convinced the team that we should be building hardware – making a new class of computers not a software application.

North Carolina 126

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. We hired union laborers to do that. Two paragraphs, Five bullets.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? And we lost money when we did so.

Silicon Valley 144

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 144

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2013

But what made the overwhelming impression for me was finding an entrepreneurial software cluster on par with the Internet software portion of Silicon Valley. It’s much easier to just steal their ideas and hire their employees. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. In the U.S.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley China Venture Capital Merger 161

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. it was the speed of the applications that customers were using to get their work done. So I was going to give our customers metrics neither they or anyone else had ever seen before.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Teams are continuing their relentless interviewing of customers, or beneficiaries as we call them in this class. The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

Teams are continuing their relentless interviewing of customers, or beneficiaries as we call them in this class. The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

After a year and a half of running training and teaching the new Z-8000 and its peripheral chips, I began to figure out that one of the jobs of marketing was to translate what engineering built into a description that our salesmen could use to talk to potential customers. I also knew our customers. But Intel was kicking our rear.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

A college degree is great if you’re looking to get hired. This is a perfect example of why it’s important to talk to customers. Somewhere along the line, however, Michael and his co-founder stopped listening to customers. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. We thought we figured it out.

Cofounder 143

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 143

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit.

Silicon Valley 129

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 129

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

A college degree is great if you’re looking to get hired. This is a perfect example of why it’s important to talk to customers. Somewhere along the line, however, Michael and his co-founder stopped listening to customers. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. We thought we figured it out.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

Silicon Valley 279

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 279

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

Its easy to take Silicon Valley for granted. Ive written a little bit about the origins of Silicon Valley because I think its important for us to understand how we got here in order to make sure we preserve what is best about our community. And do your customer development.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Lean 113

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. Quickly iterate the product in front of customers. Here’s why.

Lean 260

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 260

Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture means that others will help when you’re starting up. Yet this same network of connected people affects who gets funded, how startup teams form, and who gets hired. . The features didn’t match what ultimately the customers would buy or wanted.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley North Carolina Cofounder Entrepreneur 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, November 11, 2008 Where did Silicon Valley come from? I think the absolute best reading on this subject is a book called Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 by AnnaLee Saxenian. And what were they doing beforehand?

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

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. At first glance, the diagram, which illustrates the process of getting a new product into the hands of waiting customers, appears helpful and benign.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 2, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 2, 2008 Paul Graham on fundraising I have found no better primer on the current realities of starting a new technology company in a startup hub like Silicon Valley than Paul Grahams essays. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Software Review Technical Review Continuous Deployment 125

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. Carpe Diem. We’re now in the second Internet bubble.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2010

Id like to call special attention to Kurt Carr s perspective (lets hope he finishes his five-part series): Now that I’m back in Ohio (I was one of the token foreigners in a room full of Silicon Valley residents), I have found myself reliving and rethinking much of what I saw there. We all owe him our thanks for persevering.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 133

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. We finally settled on a $1.99 Setup a simple website.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Customer development. The biggest source of cost/time advantage that all lean companies have is avoiding building features that customers dont want. For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought Id include a few links. This speeds up the Ideas-Code-Data feedback loop.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102