Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (also 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.

Michigan 275

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 275

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit). It has to find product-market fit before running out of cash.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Up and Running

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

Optimize product development and marketing process. Understand how to monetize a product based on actual user needs. It is a good way to justify market demand for a product and then get support from investors or partners. The practice of building a minimum viable product is a long-standing one on the tech market.

San Francisco 106

San Francisco Audience SMS Demand 106

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

While it’s useful to be able to have a sales forecast and expense budget early on, it’s not something you need until you’ve validated your idea. Later you will want to come back and create a proper sales forecast, cash flow forecast, and expense budget. This is the simplest version of your product minus the frills and frosting.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Spencer Fry

MAY 2, 2014

Anyone who works in product development will know that ten months is an eternity. The product offering is itself the same: offer perks and rewards to your employees. Still, I blame myself for the scope of the product update. Where bootstrapping has helped us is that it has given us time to design, build and experiment.

Bootstrapping 57

Bootstrapping Revenue Product Development Forecast 57

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

And they rolled all of this up into a set of financial forecasts with a “size of market” forecast from brand name management consulting firms that said they’d have 42 million customers by 2002. Second, since it knew the solution, it went into a 8 -year Waterfall engineering development process. It All Came Crashing Down.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? Platform selection and technical design - if your business strategy is to create a low-burn, highly iterative lean startup, youd better be using foundational tools that make that easy rather than hard.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

These founders specify, design, and build a fully featured product using classic product development methods without ever leaving their building. Executives look at that date and the calendar, working backward to ignite fireworks on the day the product is launched.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 12, 2022

It has less focus on financial forecasting and a greater focus on the big picture. For example, James Dyson, inventor of the iconic vacuum cleaner, tried out 5,126 prototypes of his invention before he found a design that worked. You’ll review your financial forecast, your milestones, and your overall strategy.

Business Plan 83

Business Plan Lean Forecast Exit Strategy 83

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

In our previous post we posited that Scalable Startups are designed to become large companies. What makes the current evaluation hard is that is based not on an assessment of what they have done, but on a forecast of what they are capable of becoming. Scalable Startups at Adolescence.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 7, 2013

Painting the scenario of how things will evolve, Cort Isernhagen of IDC Insights forecasted at the recent Infocomm Technology Roadmap Symposium 2012 that the ICT landscape over the next 10 years needs to consider four macro trends supported by four key pillars of technology. What will the future of InfoComm Technology (ICT) be like?

Technology 174

Technology Singapore Malaysia Indonesia 174

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.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The Use of a Product Development Model to Measure Sales Using the product development diagram for startup sales activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature.

Customer Development 220

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Just for reference, Slidebean is a SaaS presentation software where users can add content, and a finished presentation is designed automatically. 1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth. Nov-15: Graphic Designer (growth/product). Lean marketing.

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

I started with some basic theory: that a startup is an institution designed to thrive in the soil of extreme uncertainty; that traditional management techniques rooted in forecasting and planning would not work well in the face of that uncertainty. Lean Startup has gone mainstream.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Up and Running

MAY 22, 2013

In a consumer product category such as household cleaning products, the industry success rate is a dismal 15 percent to 20 percent according to a Bloomberg Businessweek interview with former Proctor & Gamble CEO, Alan “A.G.” Half the companies in our survey experience budget overruns in new-product development.

Product 75

Product Marketing Forecast B2B 75

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Take a look at the companies who have raised money (and are still going) after competing: [link] Preparing the pitch for a year is definitely excessive, but I don’t see the harm done in taking a few weeks of doing brutally honest market validation, surveys, financial forecasts etc. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Business Plan 143

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 143

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Because five whys kept turning up a few key metrics that were hard to set static thresholds for, we even had a dynamic prediction algorithm that would make forecasts based on past data, and fire alerts if the metric ever went out of its normal bounds. You can even read a cool paper one of our engineers wrote on this approach).

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Ben's Blog

OCTOBER 17, 2011

If you think of a business as a series of processes executed by a variety of people designed to create specific, measurable outcomes then you get the basic idea of how Tidemark defines a blueprint and aligns itself to the business. For those of us who have been around this kind of software for years, Tidemark’s breakthroughs are breathtaking.

Romania 78

Romania Architecture Analytics Cloud 78

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Companies that reliably fail to make their forecasted numbers are exceptionally prone to “management retooling.&# Certainly venture-backed startups don’t have this luxury – every business plan has a model in it. Just because entrepreneurs tend to forget about these models doesn’t mean their investors do.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

ConversionXL

JUNE 13, 2017

Traditionally associated with development and product management, agile is a lightweight and, well, agile framework for software development and bringing features and products to market. Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact Scrum and empirical product development. Sprint Backlog.

SCRUM 112

SCRUM Agile Marketing Development Team Review 112

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. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

Up and Running

JULY 27, 2016

While you always want to focus on improving your product or service to help retain customers, there are a few things you can do to help reduce churn that aren’t related to product development and building out new features. See Also: A Complete Guide to Forecasting Sales for Your Monthly Subscription (SaaS) Business.

Revenue 60

Revenue Churn Rate Metrics Analytics 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 6, 2011

The finished book will come out on September 13, featuring an amazing cover designed by my IMVU co-founder Marcus Gosling and refined and tested by so many of you. Most of our management tools, like planning and forecasting, require a long and stable operating history. page proofs, and mailing (!) them back to my publisher.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Metrics Private Equity 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Get 18 months or more of cash (runway) in the business against a conservative forecast. Act now, act with speed. Protect the vital core of the business.Use a scalpel to make strategic cuts. Defer all facilities expansions, capital expenditures. Use Google Apps. Reprioritize & rerationalize all R&D.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

Talking about trends is more about trying to forecast the future, like a guru, sometimes it works, sometimes not. Of course, will be hard to turn in future your free success onto money success, but maybe it´s a to go. About spot trends. i dont believe we can do thinks like that. What we do is to build the future WITH the users.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

What to do with AI: Predict churn ; Identify which offers to send to an individual; Accelerate innovation; Personalize content; Account-based marketing ; Algorithmic attribution; Forecast future lift; Predict blame. Brian Cugelman: “Consumer Psychology, Dopamine, and Conversion Design”. How was it conducted? Test it for yourself.

Artificial Inteligence 114

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114