Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 6, 2019

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer. Only one-third make it past their tenth anniversary.

Finance 320

Finance Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 320

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

The book has been shepherded and edited by a great Japanese VC at Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital, Takashi Tsutsumi, with help from Masato Iino. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. But customers didn’t agree.

Japan 292

Japan Customer Development Developer Customer 292

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. I visited Bend last year and caught up with his progress.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 4, 2022

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer.

Intellectual Property 261

Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator Bootstrapping 261

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me a view of the management issues my customers were dealing with. There was nothing suggesting that startups and new ventures needed their own tools and techniques, different from those written about in HBR or taught in business schools.

Technical Review 327

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 327

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

She had so much insight to share that we broke the interview into two parts, 1) Corporate Venture Capital and more broadly, 2) How the Fortune 500 Can Buy, Invest and Partner with the Innovation Economy (coming soon). . I recently had a chance to interview Mari Joller , an expert on corporate innovation, on this topic.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology.

Lean 120

Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me a view of the management issues my customers were dealing with. There was nothing suggesting that startups and new ventures needed their own tools and techniques, different from those written about in HBR or taught in business schools.

Technical Review 219

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 219

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? How many are there? Can it scale?”

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

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. What is venture capital, really? And what does a venture capital firm do?

Lean 108

Lean Venture Capital Conversion IPO 108

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer.

Intellectual Property 309

Intellectual Property Technical Review Venture Capital Startup 309

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2013

The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here.

Lean 330

Lean Venture Capital Customer Development Startup 330

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 30, 2019

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer.

Intellectual Property 219

Intellectual Property Technical Review Startup Incubator 219

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

I interviewed Eric for an hour for - This Week in Venture Capital. Timecodes: 00:00 Welcome, our guest is Eric Ries, founder of the Lean Startup Movement. 01:17 Background, before the Lean Startup. 22:53 Eric’s book: The Lean Startup. 26:44 Too much capital is not good. There are many in this episode.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley Lean Social Media PR 301

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

Larry had the DNA I’ve seen common with all the successful entrepreneurs I’ve backed in my 25 years of Venture Capital work—only he had a more exaggerated case than most. The final proof of a compelling technical vision is that customers were interested—the phone was always ringing. Pragmatic and Lean. What a gift!

Technical Review 333

Technical Review Venture Capital Software Review Database 333

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 22, 2012

He also nails the reason why venture capital is still necessary to grow large businesses quickly in a world where the costs of running startups have fallen dramatically. After all, growth equals high valuations and loads of venture capital! It might be for technical reasons or it might be for customer adoption reasons.

Silicon Valley 390

Silicon Valley Venture Capital Startup Technical Review 390

online.wsj.com

SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit www.djreprints.com. SIGNIFICANCE PROMINENT. --> The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail. See a sample reprint in PDF format. SMALL BUSINESS. Stock Quotes.

Venture Capital 107

Venture Capital Software Review Rhode Island North Dakota 107

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2015

I was in New York last week teaching my annual 5-day version of the Lean LaunchPad class at the Columbia Business School. We had 130 students in 30 teams who got out of the classroom and did 2154 customer interviews in 5 days – a remarkable effort for 120 hours. What role does venture capital play?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley New York City New York Venture Capital 120

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 14, 2014

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer.

Entrepreneur 283

Entrepreneur Intellectual Property Technical Review Incubator 283

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

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.

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

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. What a great idea.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

abovethecrowd.com

DECEMBER 18, 2017

While other industries often speak of being “customer centric” or “putting the customer first,” the U.S. healthcare system rarely thinks of the patient as a customer. healthcare market is the least customer centric of any customer service industry. One could go even farther, and suggest that the U.S.

Customer 59

Customer Technical Review Venture Capital Software Review 59

Seeing Both Sides

SEPTEMBER 19, 2010

The post is a great one, and it raises something I've been thinking a bit about lately, which is whether the lean start-up approach to building start-ups can be applied to industries beyond Internet/software. The case studies will go beyond Internet/software start-ups in exploring how other sectors can apply lean start-up theory.

Venture Capital 37

Venture Capital Lean Technical Review Software Review 37

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 12, 2018

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer. Only one-third make it past their tenth anniversary.

Intellectual Property 134

Intellectual Property Technical Review Startup Incubator 134

Up and Running

MAY 28, 2015

We recently had Tim Berry, Palo Alto Software founder and business planning expert, present our Bplans audience with his latest advice on lean business planning. Start your lean business plan today: Download our Free Lean Plan Template one-page-pitch-download.pdf. I’m going to start with what’s a lean business plan.

Lean 60

Lean Business Plan Video Software Review 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

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. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s, the emergence of Venture Capital as a professional industry, the personal computer revolution in 1980’s, the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Up and Running

AUGUST 30, 2021

When we graduate, we don’t really know what a “good customer” is. For Alex at Origin , a scheduling and booking platform for outdoor guiding companies, he soon realized that for the company to grow exponentially, they’d need thousands of customers because of how fragmented the market is. Go lean with your planning.

Entrepreneur 132

Entrepreneur Lean Colorado Engineer 132

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2013

The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here.

Lean 222

Lean Venture Capital Customer Development Startup 222

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2017

Now they are starting to use the Lean Innovation process (see here and here ) to turn ideas into solutions. He wanted to build an innovation pipeline that would allow the Navy to: Create “dual-use” products (build solutions that could be used for the military but also sold commercially, and attract venture capital investments.)

Lean 212

Lean SBIR Incubator Curation 212

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

The idea of exploitation versus exploration was central in my own work in building the lean methodology for start-ups. The key was the realization that start-ups are not simply smaller versions of large companies, which execute/ exploit known business models, and whose customers, problems, and necessary product features are all “knowns.”

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

This is part of my ongoing series of posts and I need to file this one under both Raising Venture Capital and Startup Advice. The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. I care about your assumptions going in.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. We’ve been reading your blog about your Lean Launchpad class.” We want to make a bet that your Lean Launchpad class can apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

SoCal CTO

MARCH 1, 2010

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs , February 2, 2010 Looks at the critical equation around customer acquisition cost vs. customer lifetime value similar to what I discussed in Startup Metrics but in more depth. Great stuff. This post looks at the implementation details of HTML 5 video.

Acquisition 150

Acquisition Cofounder Technical Cofounder Cost 150

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 1, 2017

The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. Commit to a major customer.

Product Development 177

Product Development Cost Developer Product 177

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

I think customer feedback comes in a very unstructured manner, hence it is difficult to apply an algorithm on it. to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. Order Here.

Customer Development 124

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124