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

JANUARY 2, 2014

Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences.

Lean 244

Lean Algorithm Customer Development IP 244

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

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ The old paradigm works like this: Your company produces goods and services that help customers get a job done. In return, the customers pay you money. The new approach makes so much more sense.

Customer 168

Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

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. A Five-sided Market. It’s Much Simpler.

Customer 324

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 324

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? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building? What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking?

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

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. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

Lean 300

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 300

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

That died with waterfall software development. I’m not even talking about your 12-page Powerpoint presentation that you need to raise venture capital or to talk with potential biz dev partners. Let’s take your revenue line. I care about the thought that you’ve given to the customer problem.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

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

ConversionXL

JULY 1, 2014

Conversions are mostly about being relevant to your customers. If what you offer and the way you present it is relevant to your visitors they will convert to buying customers. Then again if you don’t understand who your customer is or worse it’s “everybody” then you have very little change of being successful at it.

Customer 76

Customer Design Software Review Lead Generation 76

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “. It’s hard to believe these are the methods and tools of a profession designed to attract and persuade us to become customers — especially when “we the buyers” increasingly ignore them. Pushy salespeople.

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. The board was getting nervous as the company was missing its revenue plan. The board was getting nervous as the company was missing its revenue plan. Have you heard it personally from the customers?”.

Forecast 272

Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 272

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. I break the answer to that question down into three engines: Viral - this is the business model identified in the presentation as "Get Users."

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 19, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter –Customer Discovery in Digital Health. The Resultcare presentation slides are below.

Lean 253

Lean Customer Development Video Distribution 253

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

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

It struck me as I watched the teams try to find how their technology would solve real customer problems, is that machine learning is following a similar pattern of previous technical infrastructure innovations. I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present. And present what they learned each week in an 8-minute presentations.

Artificial Inteligence 320

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 320

View from Seed

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

At NextView we invest across the spectrum of seed stage companies so roughly 1/3rd of the companies we invest in are pre-product, roughly 1/3rd are post-product but pre-revenue, and perhaps 1/3rd have some very early revenue. You’re obviously not showing charts of user growth, number of customers, or revenue.

Seed Stage 149

Seed Stage B2B Seed Capital Revenue 149

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

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. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Cofounder 143

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 143

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter – Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences.

Lean 252

Lean Customer Development Business Model Channel 252

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

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. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination. Yet year after year, decade after decade, VC’s would watch as no startup business plan survived first contact with customers. It takes a ton of face-face customer interactions.

Business Model 264

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 264

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

So when it came time to start their next company the starting questions was, “OK, what big problem could we solve for local TV broadcasters?&# They’re taking on the declining revenue streams of local TV and creating new, measurable ad activities. So the whole customer development cycle is very streamlined.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. to optimize this search.

Wiki 312

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences.

Lean 243

Lean Customer Development IP Agile 243

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 322

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 322

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) In an existing company with existing customers you 1) understand the customers problem and 2) since you do, you can specify the entire feature set on day one. The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption.

Burn Rate 248

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 248

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Assuming you know what the customer wants. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 278

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 278

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 26, 2013

Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Market Type.

Lean 239

Lean Customer Development Video Early Stage 239

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. What happened?

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Its a gross number, not per-customer: one hit each from a million people is a very different thing than a million hits from just one person. So its reasonable to ask: whats wrong with vanity metrics, at least as a proxy for customer behavior? Its just that the declining segments customers were more valuable.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

In fact, by the start of class they had ~$750K in revenue for 2011 – not quite Facebook but a nice small business. But they had minimal understanding of their target customer segment(s), and in the relentlessly direct nature of the class, we let them know it. They ran 10 in-store demos, which got them talking to 100s of more customers.

North America 120

North America Lean Customer Development Distribution 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

The class has talked to 1,440 customers to date.). The teams present what they learned talking to 10-15 customer/week, and get comments, suggestions and critiques from their teaching team. It turns out that for commercialization, the business model (Customers, Channel, Revenue Model, etc.) Digital Health.

Lean 260

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 260