Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. My first IPO at Convergent.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 180

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

Welcome to the Lost Decade (for Entrepreneurs, IPO’s and VC’s) - 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. Customer Care Today. Here’s why. 10 Blogging Tips.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

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

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. While individual VC’s inside venture firms specialized in particular domains (PC’s, peripherals, semiconductors, test equipment, operating systems, applications, etc.,) In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 262

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

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

.” Here’s the summary of his track record (excerpted from the Fast Company article): Forefront — IPO’ed in 1995 by CBT — CBT stock fell 85% in 1998 and prompted class-action lawsuits. invested, IPO’ed in 2000 for $32/share — stock price now $2. from an IPO under a year ago of $10.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. why didnt operations get paged? How do you get started with five whys?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

But it goes beyond that, including techniques for improving the economics of product development. Reinertsen weaves together ideas from lean manufacturing, maneuver warfare, queuing theory, and even the architecture of computer operating systems and the Internet. percent utilization in the precourse surveys. What will this do?

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. Talking to potential customers and competitors customers.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Steve Blank

MARCH 9, 2016

We didn’t IPO it. there’s a big difference between creating things, managing things, and operating things. We were better at creating things and not so good at managing or operating them. … Customer input shaped Amper’s product: One of the things that was really important to us was using Lean methodology.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Cofounder Entrepreneur IPO 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 18, 2010 Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases non-events The following is a case study of one entrepreneurs transition from a traditional development cycle to continuous deployment. Many people still find this idea challenging, even for companies that operate solely on the web.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2011

This all changed in 1980 with the Genentech IPO. In 1980 Genentech became the first IPO of a venture funded biotech company. Yet for the last 40 years, while technical founders knew that no business plan survived first contact with customers, they lacked a management tool set for learning, discovery and experimentation.

Engineer 310

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital 310

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Rather than use boring section headers, I thought Id just quote from actual customers, in their own words. Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. It does it all by asking your customers just one magic question.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2010

One team is in charge of carrying out the vision as currently specified, and one team is constantly asking the skeptical questions: who is the customer? One team is in charge of carrying out the vision as currently specified, and one team is constantly asking the skeptical questions: who is the customer?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Management Founder Lean 161

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. When operating with continuous deployment, its almost impossible to have integration conflicts. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Small batches reduce overhead.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

For a marketing job, for example, its reasonable to expect that a candidate will have done their homework and used your product (maybe even talked to your customers) before coming in. Still, a startup product development team is a service organization. and 2) can they get excited about what your company does?

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If I have some budget for outside help, should I hire a vendor to help us drive down our payment fraud rates by 1% (ROI easy to predict), or hire a market research firm to give us insights into potential customers (ROI hard to predict)? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Indeed the first thing I thought when I read the first paragraphs that the product manager was operating in a white tower and that the developers felt disenfranchised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? This post has been removed by the author. Nice write-up.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

Having early customers means balancing the needs of your existing customers with the desire to find new ones. The advantages of cross-functional teams are well documented, and for a thorough treatment I recommend the theory in the second half of Agile Software Development with Scrum.

San Francisco 74

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

If we accept the verdict of customers instead of pundits, I think these claims are easy to dismiss. One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# For example, imagine a team operating in a traditional waterfall development system, without continuous deployment, test-driven development, or continuous integration.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

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. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 268

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 268

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

For example, lets say you dont have an operations team, and so youre still getting paged late at night when servers crash. Is it time to make your first operations hire? If youre coming in to work groggy and therefore are not spending time with customers, Im willing to bet it is. That depends.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Of course, its possible that after the product is shipped and customer feedback is solicited, the next product design might be different. Yet a huge class of modern software projects are being developed in a very different context. It should still be Firm, and still promote Delight for our current customers.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 7, 2009

As the product matured, they were able to ratchet up the quality to prevent regression on features that had been truly embraced by their customers. On the negative side, we got a visceral feel for the kinds of changes that could really harm customers, like commits that take the whole site down. And that was not a lot of fun.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Software Review Lean 131

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Unfortunately, customers hated that initial product. For example, at a previous virtual world company , we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. Leverage product development with open source and third parties. How likely will customers ultimately use that feature?

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

At Toyota , they are called Chief Engineer : Toyota realizes that the Chief Engineer job is probably the most important one in the company because the Chief Engineer listens to the customer and then determines what the functions need to do to address the customer’s desires. What is customer development?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 8, 2008

Maybe two different developers made changes to the same underlying subsystem, but in incompatible ways. Maybe operations has changed the OS configuration in production in a way that is incompatible with some developers change. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Software Review 136

Software Review San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 136

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. For example, a recent event I held started with a customer validation exercise (actually, this example is fictionalized for clarity). What’s happening?

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

That mission critical customers wont accept new releases on a continuous basis. Most customers of most products hate new releases. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better. Lets take each in turn. Another release?

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Ive previously written about the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers , and how to get started with customer segmentation. it seemed time to return to the subject of investigating who my customers are. Thats a common pattern to gaining customer insight. Customer knows they have a problem.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. Customer data is normally partitioned according to customer id. What about log data about customers? For example, lets say you have data about customers. Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

To do that they need to understand value, communicate with other business people (like bankers and VCs) about value, and communicate with prospective customers about value. these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

He has a good team, and theyve shipped a working product to many customers. But they are pushing for the things that matter to customers - features. And they are cognizant that their funding is limited, and if they dont find out which features are absolutely critical for their customers soon, they wont be able to survive.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

DC 90

DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90