Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 424

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

ReadWriteStart

DECEMBER 15, 2022

Being able to hire talented professionals remains a difficult proposition in the current job market, especially when sourcing experienced developers, designers, and project managers. For example, Lean Startup offers many benefits to emerging organizations, especially considering its focus on crafting a minimum viable product (MVP).

Incubator 188

Incubator Startup Software Developers Software Development 188

Hunter Walker

AUGUST 31, 2021

Early adopter verticals — such as software development and tech sales — is mostly in Gen 3. Some of the largest markets including construction, health care, finance and agriculture are moving into Gen 1 and 2, with specific toes dipped carefully into 3. Thankfully I knew there were better options in development.

Software 116

Software Vertical Framework Software Developers 116

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Chapter 4: Brand Identity Design: the Building Blocks of Your Brand Identity. Chapter 5: Designing Your Brand Identity. Chapter 7: How To Translate Your Brand Identity Into Actual Marketing. Put another way: a designer’s job isn’t to design a brand. Chapter 6: Create a Brand Style Guide. style guide.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. I would discover that there was a more effective alternative in building a marketing department than hiring traditional marketers with MBA’s. Context here.)

Engineer 218

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 218

Up and Running

MAY 3, 2021

You might want to be an all-rounder SEO agency or, as we discuss later in this piece, you may want to specialize your verticals. Expertise in a specific industry vertical or process? Due to this relative lack of speed on SEO’s part, it can be difficult to make the case for it, but leaning on data can help.

SEO 147

SEO Vertical Metadata Forecast 147

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

Today, Grizzle is a full-service content marketing and SEO agency that provides B2B and SaaS companies end-to-end services. Here, I’ll show you the journey we took to finding our place in the market by testing, pivoting, and re-pivoting our serving offerings and value propositions so you can grow your agency faster, without fewer wrong turns.

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

VC Cafe

MAY 21, 2024

Consequently, I do not believe GenAI will disrupt the infrastructure market, according to Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. You will not need the same amount of programmers, designers/creators, marketers etc. These vertices offer the highest potential to disrupt established markets.

Generative AI 97

Generative AI ChatGPT Vertical B2B 97

View from Seed

OCTOBER 14, 2021

We’ve come a long way these last ten years, and we wanted our new website design to honor that time; retracing our steps, while also walking forward in the direction of digital trends on the horizon. What story are you looking to tell with the new design? . Let’s design the future we want to live in, shall we?

Seed Stage 296

Seed Stage Portfolio Curation Vertical 296

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that.

Vertical 135

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 135

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. Ultimately you want to see if you can find customers and a market for the product as specified – as early as possible. Technology?

Vertical 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

ConversionXL

JUNE 30, 2019

Knowing what the competitors are doing—how they’re thinking about the market, which tactics they’re using, how they’re crafting messages and design—can make all the difference in the battle for customers. And it’s not just a CRO problem—it’s a marketing-wide phenomenon. Free UX & Usability course.

SEO 126

SEO Conversion Analytics Design 126

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

One of the times I screwed this up it left a legacy of 25 years of questionable design in microprocessor architecture. Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. It has to be little-endian or we won’t design your chip into our systems.”

Customer Development 283

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

View from Seed

OCTOBER 14, 2021

We’ve come a long way these last ten years, and we wanted our new website design to honor that time; retracing our steps, while also walking forward in the direction of digital trends on the horizon. What story are you looking to tell with the new design? . Let’s design the future we want to live in, shall we?

Seed Stage 194

Seed Stage Portfolio Curation Vertical 194

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 243

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 243

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? No, not really.

Silicon Valley 153

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 153

ConversionXL

MAY 11, 2017

Knowing what the competitors are doing – how they are thinking about the market, what tactics they are using, how they are crafting messages and design – can make all the difference in the battle for the customers’ mind share and conversions. And it’s not just a CRO problem – it is a marketing-wide phenomenon.

SEO 131

SEO Analytics Conversion Search 131

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

At Dribbble, we stumbled into ours – we were just building a side project, but it was a site for designers, and Dan is a designer with lots of recognition and credibility. If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. Stay lean for as long as possible. Be creative, and stay lean.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Next, look at the current state of your market: Who’s interested in your product or services? This is most likely covering old ground, but it helps to know that your audience and market position remain relevant before investing in something that may fall flat. Another great use of content advertising can be found in email marketing.

Advertising 131

Advertising Cost Customer PR 131

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Why they were looking to me to run marketing wasn’t clear. The company was the laughing stock of the Mac market. The two other players in the add-on graphics business, Radius and RasterOps, had a combined 90% market share. The assets were a series of products already developed and on the market or in the development pipeline.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 161

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Their presentation looked like this: Market/Opportunity Lessons Learned Slide 1 Lessons Learned Slide 2 Lessons Learned Slide 3 Why We’re Here Telling the Cafepress Customer Discovery and Customer Validation story allowed Fred and Maheesh to take the VC’s on their journey year by year. First, build something you think people want.

Venture Capital 234

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 234

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

You pay, download the stock photo, jury-rig it into your design, and look at your work with a mixed sense of pride and shame. Here’s the problem: Every other poor schmuck in every other vertical has used the exact…same…photograph. Now, not all stock photographs are bad… …just the designers who use them.

Stock 71

Stock Software Review Arizona Technical Review 71

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. Morale in Sales and Marketing starts to plummet. Blame it On Marketing In the next 3-6 months, a new VP of Sales is hired.

Customer Development 232

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 232

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. Blog at WordPress.com.

Customer Development 127

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 127

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford. met one of each in the last week.

Silicon Valley 200

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 200

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. Sharding for startups To support a single partitioning scheme is easy, especially if you design for it from the start. Ive taught everyone from hard-core programmers to scripters to HTML-designers to use it properly. to store it.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology. This is an innovative but slightly bizarre design technique common to the 1920s and 1930s that conserved the number of vacuum tubes required for a radio receiver.

Silicon Valley 294

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 294

Where to Play

MARCH 14, 2018

The post Success story: how startup Augury determined its market opportunities appeared first on Where to Play. Augury is bringing predictive maintenance technology to new markets. Having a clear vision doesn’t automatically mean having a clear target market. At times, it seemed like the possibilities were endless.

Artificial Inteligence 91

Artificial Inteligence Marketing Vertical Startup 91

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. Long gone from Zilog I saw the picture of the original Macintosh design team. I thought nothing about the meeting until years later.

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 140

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. I remember presenting our ideas for Marketing Automation to one VP of Marketing in a large Silicon Valley company. He was now CEO of a new company in our market.

Silicon Valley 248

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 248

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. Yet some startups such as Biotech don’t have market risk, instead they are dominated by technical risk.

Customer Development 227

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 227

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. By contrast, most investments in traditional prevention are designed to anticipate and fix a specific problem. In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 142

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 142

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Do they believe you have a big enough vision and market. Tons of advice is available on how to pitch , present and market your company. If you’re following Customer Development you are now raising money because even with this first rev of the product you think you’ve found product/market fit and you want to scale.

Customer Development 266

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 266

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Because of the vagaries of how floating point units in computers were designed, your average IBM mainframe of the day would take forever to run a simulation application. What Markets? The one thing I did know is that we were probably going to be running some of the same applications as the market leader Cray.

Silicon Valley 163

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 163

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Designing the Perfect Building Once the commitment to fix everything wrong was in place, we were off and running on the design phase. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. The exec staff started meeting about the design of the new building. Stay hungry, stay lean.

Silicon Valley 226

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 226

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.” It would be the company where I actually earned the title.

North Carolina 129

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 129