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. I still don’t know what happened!”

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Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 20, 2010

This time I thought I’d try and address engineering talent. Often I’m asked by startup CEO’s about how to best build an engineering team. This post is designed mostly for non-technical founders. They care about the quality of what is build more than they care about end customers.

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Fractional CTO CTO Hire Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 400

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2014

Much has been written about when it is time to hire a “professional CEO” to run a startup company and of course that has long been a norm in Silicon Valley when founders find that their inexperience may be a limiting factor in company growth ( know as the Peter Principle ). I like technical founders so this wasn’t an issue.

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Founder CTO Hire Silicon Valley Leadership 309

TechEmpower

NOVEMBER 13, 2023

So instead, we fill it with a completely custom blurb, written just for him: Hello! Thanks to his custom blurb, instead of closing his browser and feeling inadequate for the rest of the day, Mark completes his bio and becomes a happy customer. Which means better conversions and happier customers.

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VC Cafe

MARCH 1, 2024

Most startups equate the process of fundraising to dating – founders have to typically kiss a lot of frogs until the find the right fit. AI to build enterprise software – In the future, every enterprise could have their own custom ERP, CRM or HRIS that is continually updating itself as the company itself is changing.

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Software Review Generative AI 176

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 29, 2019

by Manish Dudharejia, President and Founder of E2M Solutions Inc. Today’s customers are increasingly skeptical and distrusting, especially when it comes to marketing. This is why having a robust library of honest customer reviews is so essential for building trust and confidence with new customers. Let’s discuss.

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Software Review Technical Review Conversion Customer 127

Hunter Walker

AUGUST 11, 2022

In addition to our dollars, we are eager to help founders with the construction of their cap table, not just generically with the highest profile folks available, but more specifically where they might get some help along the way. What expertise do the founders personally have? Founders Often Don’t Come From These Backgrounds….

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The Startup Magazine

MAY 31, 2022

As part of our Female Founder series , The Startup Magazine caught up with Claudia Freed, CEO of the Wheaton Illinois-based nonprofit EALgreen. Through the 5 R’s of the circular economy—Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose and Recycle—EAL converts donations of customer returns and other excess inventory into operational savings for colleges.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2014

Two methods, Design Thinking and Customer Development (the core of the Lean Startup) provide the tactical day-to-day process of how to turn ideas into products. . While they both emphasize getting out of the building and taking to customers, they’re not the same. Here’s why.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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VC Cafe

JULY 29, 2012

human engineering VC Cafe Photo credit: By imaginedhorizons (Flickr). ” Question: What is Human Engineering? This also applies to partners – whether it means co-founders or other businesses and partners you come in contact with. Wikipedia ). Shockingly, only 15 percent is due to technical knowledge.

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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.&# Context here.)

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 6, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan On August 20, Eric will sit down with developer and Hut8Labs co-founder Dan Milstein for a webcast you can join to discuss “Getting Engineers Into the Lean Startup Cycle.” This conversation will be a great opportunity for engineers and engineering managers to learn more about implementing Lean Startup ideas.

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View from Seed

OCTOBER 11, 2023

Deep Domain Expertise at the Helm Sincera Founders Mike O’Sullivan and Ian Meyers bring to the table a rich expertise and domain knowledge in the ad tech space. With the seed funding, Sincera plans to expand its engineering team to better serve the flood of customer interest which the company has experienced since launching last year.

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Metadata Technical Review Advertising Angel Investor 177

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 15, 2009

This can often happen when there is a good product built but no real customer adoption yet. I hired a senior exec from the building materials industry (we were a document collaboration company for the engineering & construction industry) who was also ex McKinsey. This is what happened to me. He was to head up UK operations.

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Founder Technical Review Startup Venture Capital 299

View from Seed

APRIL 21, 2015

On the heels of our research on HBS entrepreneurs , NextView’s Dimitri Dadiomov (HBS ’15) interviewed several top founders on the early stages of their companies. Matt Prince , Co-Founder and CEO, CloudFlare (Web performance and security to protect and accelerate websites; $72.1 On Launching and Finding Early Traction.

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Cracking the Code

MAY 2, 2019

Team building is top of mind for any start-up founder or exec. Recruiting and retaining top talent is even more challenging for software engineers. To get an insight into how successful start-ups approach team building, we spoke to Sylvain Utard, employee number 1 and VP of Engineering at Algolia, an Accel portfolio company.

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YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 13, 2019

If you can’t keep the customers who sign up with you, you’re going to quickly find yourself in trouble. I get calls all the time from clients struggling to retain new customers. The point is, before you change your pricing, you need to dig deeply into what’s really driving your customers away.

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Customer Technical Review Retention Acquisition 173

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

Freshman Salesman writes: I’ve read somewhere in your blog about how you had a very large organisation as the first customer for your software. How did you reach out to your first customer? It’s rarely true that your first customer will be big. (Maybe you worked there or a co-founder or investor has some juice).

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Duct Tape Marketing

SEPTEMBER 29, 2022

A Startup Journey With GrubHub Founder Mike Evans written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. He's the founder of GrubHub and he founded in his spare bedroom and grew it to a multi billion dollar online food delivery. You have to balance that because without restaurants you kinda ha not gonna have customers.

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SoCal CTO

MARCH 20, 2007

skip to main | skip to sidebar SoCal CTO Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Kevin Federline Search Engine Just saw a post - Sleep with a pop star, get your own branded search engine. Technology Advisor Technology Roles in Startups Pricing Customer Acquisition Sunk Costs and More -. talking about Prodeges Search with Kevin Site - [link].

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.

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The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

But have you ever had the opportunity to pick the brains of founders who created amazingly successful startups and companies like Envato , Backblaze , Simple , or Treehouse ? Few people like talking about their mistakes, but thankfully nine founders took some time to share some of their hard-earned knowledge with you. Find your niche.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 2, 2020

Here’s why: because they take technology that used to be available to engineers only, and make it available to everyone. They’re still built that way by the product’s engineers. Of course, users won’t be able to customize their project as fully as if they were coding it from scratch.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) Where Are the Customers? Product Development Diagram 1.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 31, 2011

I was totally product focused for the last year and now it’s live, so I need to start thinking about finding some customers. ” So instead finding out who and where those potential customers are , which is hard, he just made a product, which is easy (for him). So I think the ideal customer is: SaaS, ISV, Web Products.

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Customer Software Review SEM Technical Review 279

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 20, 2022

Blockbuster needed to recognize the importance of providing content to their customers from the comfort of their homes. They had a model such that customers had to make two trips (to purchase and return) for any VHS. Blinded by its advertising revenue , Yahoo let customer experience take a backseat.

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Software Review Application Development Technical Review Bankruptcy 190

Duct Tape Marketing

MAY 12, 2022

Using Personalization Data To Reshape Your Customer Experience written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing. Brennan is the Co-founder of RightMessage, writes weekly at Create & Sell, and wrapping up a new book on personalized marketing. It’s given your company access to a global customer base. With technology.

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Customer Software Review Technical Review Cofounder 84

Up and Running

MARCH 20, 2018

Let’s start with the basics: You need your first 100 customers—like, now. Sales—the one word that most employees fear, but the only word that co-founders think about. This is an in-depth article that will give you a full blueprint as to how we were able to grow our unlimited graphic design service, Penji to our first 100 customers.

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Customer Software Review Social Media Technical Review 108

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

That’s what former software engineer Jamil Khan has done with his new company, North Aware , in manufacturing its Smart Parka. We wanted to ensure that the Smart Parka was manufactured with high-quality materials and in a manner that was in harmony with North Aware’s values and the values of our customers.

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Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 2, 2023

Of course, every risk level can be mitigated by a good plan that addresses the issue, offers a credible action plan, and will convince you, as well as investors and customers, that what looks like a risk to many is actually a sustainable competitive advantage for your startup. Your startup is in a high-failure-rate business sector.

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New York City Silicon Valley Bootstrapping Technical Review 246

View from Seed

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

At seed-stage startups, especially companies with well-networked founders and investors, finding applicants who can do a job on paper is not overly difficult. To help you more effectively build your early teams, we asked a group of founders to share their favorite interview questions when they build new startup teams.

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View from Seed

JUNE 23, 2022

Founder: Dennis Chim. Automating their end-to-end eCommerce operations (from managing inventory to order fulfillment to customer service). RH: Who are your customers? Get to know the founders. RH: Founders, please introduce yourselves. . RH: What’s your favorite thing about being an early-stage founder?

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DC Cambodia eCommerce Social Media 156

The Startup Magazine

JULY 21, 2021

Kevin Wu, co-founder and CEO of job search optimization program Pathrise , says “Digital marketer roles are some of the most in-demand positions in the tech industry.” SEO – Search Engine Optimization for Online Marketing Concept. These search engine optimization (SEO) skills are absolutely essential for digital marketers.

Technical Review 146

Technical Review PPC SEM Marketing 146

Version One Ventures

MARCH 29, 2024

Shippo announced Addresses API , a fast reliable solution for validating, parsing and storing customer addresses. This address management solution helps make sure the right package gets sent to the right address, while giving customers a world-class shopping experience. Qvin ’s Q-Pad received FDA Approval as a diagnostic menstrual pad.

Portfolio 82

Portfolio Software Review San Francisco API 82

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 7, 2017

The company landed one big customer representing 80% of total revenue, but that customer canceled. It wasn’t a mistake to sign that customer — it funded the entire company. Gas-powered engines that are used infrequently have a tendency to stop working, so they have to test and maintain those units.

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Software Review Channel Revenue Non-Compete 294

ConversionXL

AUGUST 12, 2020

Then, you turn up to people’s desks like an unwelcome door-to-door salesperson, trying to convince them of the virtues of customer-centricity. So how do you convince people with little motivation—throughout the entire business—to focus more on your customers? So how can data help you? Challenge opinions. Show the financial impact.

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Customer Conversion Dividend Software Review 74