Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. Customers will get to consume the content they want, and support the producers of that content directly, rather than having to rely exclusively on intermediaries. For established media empires, this is a scary fact.

San Francisco 113

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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 126

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Austin Startup

OCTOBER 22, 2017

It’s such a difficult and often counterintuitive game that the more time and attention you devote to accepting guidance at the beginning, the more misery you will be spared in your golfing career for the rest of your days. They learn how to talk with potential customers and de-risk their plans from the start.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Incubator Software Review Vertical 48

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 153

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter. It did not mean building a startup into a company to flip or hype on the market with no earnings or revenue, but building a company that had paying customers. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 233

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. By 1961 its customers now included our intelligence agencies. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. The “customers” in Washington had never seen anything like it. There were no venture investors.

Silicon Valley 190

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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. But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand.

Sales 120

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Duct Tape Marketing

JULY 18, 2023

Chat Spott automates all the manual tasks inside HubSpot to help you arrange more customers close more deals and scale your business faster. So put a vertical line down the center and on the top of the left hand column, put words to lose on top of the right hand column, put words to use. She opens the window and she leans out.

South Korea 55

South Korea Artificial Inteligence Audio Networking 55

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Since it was the military and I was a lowly airman (I was outranked by the rest of the entire air force), the answer I got was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? It gave me a sense of purpose for the rest of the war.

Silicon Valley 264

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers. Your messages should have been pre-tested with prospects and existing customers way before you go to a show. If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department.

Silicon Valley 199

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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. Gary Hoover Reply Michael F.

Silicon Valley 175

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Intellectual Property At the next class I said, “You all ought to get out and start talking to customers on day one, and get early feedback on your idea. Don’t share the details of your manufacturing process with customers until you’ve locked up your intellectual property.” Just get out of the building.”

Vertical 154

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

Our president picked up on the momentum and asked me what I needed from the rest of the exec team to fix this debacle. I replied: “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected. Some stammered out, “can you say that again?&#

Silicon Valley 120

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crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Chapter 3: Brand Identity Research: Customers, Competition, and Your Brand. A brand is the sum total of the experience your customers and customer prospects have with your company or organization. Your company’s brand is a promise you make to customers and prospects about your products, your services, and your company.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation. The heart of the Cafepress presentation is the “ Lessons Learned from our Customers ” section. The rest is just fluff. Your results may vary.

Venture Capital 234

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

The signals displayed by the ALR-20 were used to control the jammers of the rest of electronic countermeasures systems – putting out enormous number of kilowatts using brute force noise jamming and later on some much more sophisticated jamming techniques. And because of his training, an EWO could identify and prioritize the threats.

Silicon Valley 219

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Oh, and we had no installed customer base. The rest of the progress report sounded just like this. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers. Me: How are we doing on the Nastran port? Me: How about Dyna 3D ? This was my fault.

Silicon Valley 331

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We can’t bring customers to this rundown building. Stay hungry, stay lean. I don’t want to be hungry and lean (nor do I want to be full and fat). It was an odd feeling at that time, we thought we have made it and fail to stay lean and hungry. Now every engineer can have their own office.

Silicon Valley 226

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Or offer some real insights into our customers? It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Ah, a leading question.

Silicon Valley 206

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

The way that Travis had set up Uber was a kind of vertical stack, very loosely coupled efforts, and any GM was essentially the CEO of their own city. Marketing, for example, customer, product organization, et cetera. So the norms that we have were a combination of bottoms-up and then some top-down leaning.

Iran 39

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Dinner in a Strange Land When I was in my mid 20′s working at ESL, I was sent overseas to a customer site where the customers were our three-letter intelligence agencies. It’s been thirty years, but every once an awhile I still wonder what happened to the rest of their lives. Customers walk, patients sue, and people vote.

Silicon Valley 206

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. The Adventure of a Lifetime.

Entrepreneur 290

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

In the real world, most business plans don’t survive the first few months of customer contact. And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan. Preparing for a year is not the best way to spend time, rather getting customers is the better way to an Investor’s heart.

Business Plan 152

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc. Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And that’s just to get started. Let me know what you think. Comments and brickbats welcomed.

Founder 308

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

ESL sent me overseas to a secret site run by one of the company’s “customers.” And we were using thousands of chips in a configuration no rational commercial customer could imagine or afford. It was so secret the entire site was could have qualified as one of Dick Cheney’s “undisclosed locations.”

Silicon Valley 276

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

College Dropouts - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison These guys realized that customers don’t ask for your transcript. Reply Jesse Farmer , on April 7, 2009 at 8:53 am Said: Customers don’t ask for your transcript. A+ in one or two courses every semester and mediocre in the rest. You just get successful.

Silicon Valley 332

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched. How did your skills in sales and marketing and your ability to discover and validate customers run aground at Rocket Science? All that is, except for our lobby, as our offices were on the 4 th floor. steve Michael F.

Silicon Valley 135

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mobile.smashingmagazine.com

JANUARY 16, 2013

Surveys indicate that many customers are more likely to visit your website with a smartphone. A mobile-optimized structure, however, leans towards a “taller” arrangement in addition to hierarchies. In each page, seek one sentence that sums up the rest of the page. But getting there means facing a legacy that did.

Mobile 101

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. In reality the sales team was working for the rest of the company to make all of our stock valuable. But sales came first. (By

Silicon Valley 130

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YoungUpstarts

JUNE 5, 2014

Masterful execution makes up one of the triangle’s two vertical sides. (I When opinions are shared, problems hashed out, arguments heard, the best possible products are born — products that look great and work great and that are somehow so compelling to customers that they must buy them. First, what is the “soft edge”?

Algorithm 174

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

In fact, according to our Potrero benchmark suite this new board ran our customer applications ten times faster than our current products. This turned out to give our customers immense value. Now we could give customers lower price boards without Engineering spending 12 months to design new ones.)

Silicon Valley 143

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Family Rules My wife and I agreed to a few rules upfront and made up the rest as went along. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Never miss an event.

Entrepreneur 333

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blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

oz burgers as fast as possible, and commit the rest of your career to an endless series of McDonalds menus. If you want to serve enterprise customers,NET is one of the best ways to do that and do it well. I don’t like milking customer’s of their money, and I don’t like wasting my time. lorf: NET supports JAVA.

Java 107

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Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Such is the power of being able to proactively identify which of your competitor's strategies are working well, where their current customers come from, and what specific tactics you should experiment with to create and advantage for yourself. I find this behavior to be a million times more useful than demographics or political leanings.

Metrics 60

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