View from Seed

MARCH 19, 2015

He’s dubbed the approach “ pretotyping ,” and it shares many of the same principles as both its similar-sounding (if later-stage) cousin, prototyping, as well as the more well-known lean startup movement. You make your case with objective data: CTR, customer acquisition cost, etc.

Product 120

Product Technical Review Marketing Lean 120

Austin Startup

MAY 11, 2017

We invest in companies that sell to both enterprise/SMB customers as well as direct to consumers. Our unique approach to investing, coupled with a pioneering spirit, provides the vision to guide early stage growth companies beyond today and toward future success. We have a passion for product and out-of-the-box thinking.

Private Equity 48

Private Equity Venture Capital Technical Review Seed Stage 48

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. The sooner you pass your work on to a later stage, the sooner you can find out how they will receive it. Expo SF (May. .

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? Yet for every founder there are 10-20 other employees who take the near-equivalent risks in joining an early-stage company. If you’re not a founder (by choice, timing or temperament,) you may be an early employee or a later stage startup employee.

Cofounder 219

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

ConversionXL

JUNE 2, 2022

Account-based marketing is an approach where marketing and sales work together to nurture target accounts and convert or retain customers. Sales finds aligned accounts and works with marketing to create customized journeys. Sales and marketing collaborate until a deal is closed and beyond to secure long-term customer retention.

Customer 98

Customer Marketing Channel Acquisition 98

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 21, 2018

He was in a later-stage financing round and was talking with many investors. And my specific response that I recommended was to say, “I can send you our standard data pack but honestly I have too many other firms asking for customized data and we simply can’t send each person custom reports.

Term Sheet 217

Term Sheet Later Stage Demand Email 217

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 26, 2022

I think every company’s portfolio is different, so they’re all different sizes, different stages, different geographies, different cash positions, and different market leadership positions. . I will say the one thing we tell all our portfolio companies is to get fit and lean in. I like the get fit and lean in.

Partner 132

Partner Cofounder Retention Acquisition 132

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

What startup stage do they typically invest in? Do they “get&# Customer Development ? What Startup Stage Do they Invest In? Certain VC’s like the new class of Super-Angels and small VC funds specialize in the early stage of a startup where you are searching for a business model. Do They Get Customer Development?

Founder 231

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 231

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 12, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, June 12, 2009 Lean Startup Workshop scholarship program I havent had much time to write lately, and so havent been able to share much about the Lean Startup Workshop series I have been producing with OReilly in their Master Class division. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

Lean 60

Lean Programming San Francisco Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 6, 2016

It’s equally easy to go online and incorporate your new entity, register some intellectual property and have some fun with social media for marketing and interacting with customers. Most new teams are geographically dispersed these days anyway, so paying rent for an office should be differed to later stages when revenue is plentiful.

Bootstrapping 120

Bootstrapping Hockey Stick Sweat Equity Intellectual Property 120

Both Sides of the Table

JUNE 13, 2018

If your teaser deck was 8–12 pages it would likely include: team market problem why your solution solves this problem progress to date (funding, team, customers, revenue if significant) TAM (market sizing / why this will be valuable) Your “meeting deck” should just be an expansion of what was in your teaser deck. whether they invest or not.

Portfolio 261

Portfolio IP Later Stage Email 261

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 22, 2017

Early-stage companies need to define their niche in the market they serve and iterate, iterate, iterate until they’ve got a solution that delights their customer and can scale. Later-stage companies are in operating mode.

Private Equity 113

Private Equity Later Stage IPO Early Stage 113

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 13, 2018

If you have a mediocre meeting with a high-quality prospect and you don’t think they’re likely to lean in they drop to a B or C. One of the most important aims of a fund-raising process is to keep similar firms at the same stage of your process. Sometimes engagement at the later stages seems to go dry. To be clear?—?your

Term Sheet 332

Term Sheet Due Diligence Campaign Sales 332

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 31, 2019

He’ll be speaking at this year’s Lean Startup Conference , and also has a new book (for which I very happily wrote a short foreword) coming out next month: Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. Morgan credit card business to acquire tons of Square customers at a very low cost.

Lean 108

Lean Venture Capital Conversion IPO 108

This is going to be BIG.

JUNE 30, 2010

We have a good sense of what later stage VCs are going to look for and can help think about how much you need to raise to get additional interest down the line. If the feedback is great, I'm going to lean forward with some more interest. Sometimes, we even have good product feedback. That’s the same story all over again.

Technical Review 106

Technical Review Due Diligence Venture Capital Later Stage 106

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 25, 2013

But the larger funds usually have lower returns because they are often investing bigger dollars at later stages with less risk and therefore lower returns. As you can see in this Cambridge Associates data, early-stage investing beat later stage investing in returns in 70% of the past 30 years. Yeah, true.

LP 374

LP Later Stage IRR Term Sheet 374

View from Seed

MARCH 8, 2016

They tend to come when it’s time to go to market, or they’ve launched (not well) and need to grow audience or customers. They might believe that branding is a fluffy idea or a later-stage need, and right now, they need to move faster, launch, learn, grow, and survive. You can absolutely launch lean and scrappy.

Seed Stage 120

Seed Stage Conversion Startup PR 120

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development. But most commonly these are customer relationships: the operating unit becomes one of the startup’s first or largest customers. Could they excel at customer development with enterprises?

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 24, 2016

If you’re slightly later stage it might be 5–6 hours. It ought to lay out the key issues, provide 3 options per issue and state which one management is leaning toward. A board meeting shouldn’t be the place an investor questions why you’re focused on customers A and not customers B.

Metrics 196

Metrics Strategic Investors Later Stage Management 196

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Modern Corporation Marketing At the same time General Motors also revolutionized automotive marketing by creating multiple brands of cars, each with its own identity targeted at a specific economic bracket of American customers. Within each brand there were several models at different price points.

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

The Entrepreneurial Mind

JUNE 14, 2010

They do play a role, but only a limited one with later stage businesses that have good cash flow. Revenues are the best source of financing we can ever hope for during lean times. Let satisfied customers fund your growth and life is much easier than when you rely on bankers and investors. How did they do it?

Kentucky 56

Kentucky Washington Nashville Bootstrapping 56

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

This provides us more time to develop meaningful relationships with prospects and customers. Data companies focused on early-stage startups include Aingel , fundsUP , Preseries , PredictLeads , and Sploda. These typically have a larger support ecosystem and greater assurance of long-term stability than the custom vendors.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 6, 2008

Having early customers means balancing the needs of your existing customers with the desire to find new ones. In order to prevent people from bunching up in the later stages of the work pipeline, those leaders need to be focused on automation and continuous improvement. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 74

San Francisco SCRUM Lean Continuous Deployment 74

The Next Web

JULY 29, 2013

We decided to go for Berlin also because we want to shape Berlin’s startup culture, always with the goals to expand to the US at a later stage. It also helped us to start lean and simple, and grow our product into something bigger. It’s a lot more vibrant, but Berlin is catching up. It’s a difficult and long process.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Cofounder Germany Europe 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

. • Repeatable: Startups may get orders that come from board members’ customer relationships or heroic, single-shot efforts of the CEO. Does our product or service solve a customer problem (product-market fit)? How do we attract, keep and grow customers? These are great, but they are not repeatable by a sales organization.

Venture Capital 333

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 333

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2013

. • Repeatable: Startups may get orders that come from board members’ customer relationships or heroic, single-shot efforts of the CEO. Does our product or service solve a customer problem (product-market fit)? How do we attract, keep and grow customers? These are great, but they are not repeatable by a sales organization.

Venture Capital 225

Venture Capital IRR Liquidity Event Business Model 225

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 11, 2016

Common characteristics of social traffic… Could be high or low intent / level of motivation, but likely leaning towards low. Jen Havice of Make Mention Media wrote an incredible article for ConversionXL on creating data-driven personas, How To Create Customer Personas With Actual, Real Life Data. Needs to be persuaded.

PPC 48

PPC Matching Campaign San Francisco 48

Austin Startup

JUNE 26, 2019

The Whole Enchilada For those of you interested in more than The Skinny, keep reading… Countless conversations have been had with key users, customers, advisors, mentors, family and friends. and * on a bootstrapped budget* : We first engaged in customer surveys and validated a huge problem?—?several What did our customers think?

Silicon Valley 54

Silicon Valley Startup B2C Sweat Equity 54

View from Seed

MARCH 10, 2015

The goal was to give you a customized, local feel around your team. We had launched early Android and iPhone versions and tried to get coverage, and while they did okay initially, the app wasn’t customized to either platform. We were our own customer support team, for example, which I think is huge for product teams.

Mobile 120

Mobile San Francisco Curation Seed Stage 120

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 16, 2015

Peter: I’m feeling agile, I’m feeling lean, nice and spry. Jonathan: I don’t know about the agility thing, but you’re looking lean. If your customer service team is unbelievably great and innovative, a thing as simple as customer service might become your defining characteristic.

SCRUM 60

SCRUM Agile Employee Small Business 60

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Startups that are aiming to enterprises would do right raising VC to improve their network and therefore have a greater chance to get customers. All what you said is so true.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features. Founders Need to Run the Company Longer.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

pandodaily.com

NOVEMBER 29, 2012

But at a macro level, widespread failure this early is far less painful than if it came at later stages. See those things around your legs, cloud customer? Supplier, meet customer: How Chegg represents a bold new philosophy that’s changing commerce. ” On a micro level, failure is always painful. By Sarah Lacy.

Technical Review 93

Technical Review Silicon Valley Incubator Syria 93