Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Once the product begins to ship, startup sales execs use orders and revenue as its marker of progress in understanding customers. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. What happened?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe 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. After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. They never understood Market Type. End result?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Is that a lot?

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

In addition to entrepreneurship, she has a background in chemical engineering, supply chain management, biomedical engineering research, microbiology research, and new product development for U.S. and Indian companies. She is the primary inventor of a modular centrifuge that operates with or without electricity.

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Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. A typical ad-based revenue stream on a media website is around $5 per 1000 eyeballs ($5m CPM and give or take $1-$20ish CPMs). Product second. This is obvious. Marketing first. 2) B2B startups have high margins.

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Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. A typical ad-based revenue stream on a media website is around $5 per 1000 eyeballs ($5m CPM and give or take $1-$20ish CPMs). Product second. This is obvious. Marketing first. 2) B2B startups have high margins.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. And I can even imagine cases where it might burn more cash than a traditional startup. Lets see why.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. Is there a profitable business model? Can it scale?” Did the VC’s like your team ?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals. auto market with 60% of the U.S.

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YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 11, 2019

With CRM revenues at 39.5 From improved customer experiences to increased productivity, CRMs are on the rise for a reason and have become powerful and customizable enough to adapt to the needs of SMBs across industries. Time to Act With Analytics. You’ll receive digestible and actionable information in one space.

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ConversionXL

OCTOBER 23, 2019

A strong A/B testing plan will allow you to increase your revenue and learn valuable insights about your customers. *. *. Development resources are expensive, in time and cash, so enabling testing independent of product development is efficient. A/B Test Planning: How to Build a Process that Works. By Jaan Matti-Saul.

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ConversionXL

OCTOBER 23, 2019

A strong A/B testing plan will allow you to increase your revenue and learn valuable insights about your customers. *. *. Development resources are expensive, in time and cash, so enabling testing independent of product development is efficient. A/B Test Planning: How to Build a Process that Works. By Jaan Matti-Saul.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc. But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company. All the strategic thinking in the world won’t make up for a missed revenue plan. Sales was the Sharp End of the Stick, and Marketing was the Stick ?

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Occam's Razor

MAY 27, 2015

I've suffered enough bruises on the front-lines from trying to re-imagine the current and revolutionize the future across multiple industry verticals, countries, opportunity sizes. Today's primary use of the word programmatic refers to the use of ad exchanges, real-time bidding (RTB), Demand-side Platforms (DSPs) etc.

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ConversionXL

DECEMBER 3, 2018

They took a host of seemingly fragmented industry changes—customers demanding more from their vendors, customer relationships lasting years instead of days, competing businesses appearing virtually every day—and found the common thread that tied them together: more companies and customers were switching to subscriptions.

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