Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web. The first question to ask is: “Does your startup have market risk or is it dominated by technical risk?” Lean Startup /Customer Development is used to find answers to the unknowns about customers and markets. Does this help?

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show. This is worthy of an open and honest discussion with sales up front. And inviting to the booth/dinner/private demo.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

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Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Aug-15: Head of Sales (growth team). We spent a year building a solid sales and growth team before we even expanded our product team. See Also: A Complete Guide to Forecasting Sales for Your Monthly Subscription (SaaS) Business. Lean marketing. Apr-15: Head of Marketing (growth team). Dec-15: Developer (product team).

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cdixon.org

SEPTEMBER 17, 2011

You’ll refine your sales and investor pitch. But it’s probably wise to be more secretive in some vertical markets: [link]. link] Lean Startups Blog – rants and raves from the startup trenches. ” He noted that Chris Dixon (@cdixon) of Hunch tweeted, “New early-stage start up [.].

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. Its strength is its rigor and flexibility.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Rule 1: In an existing market Customer Development means not only understanding potential customers, but your competitors in detail – their product features, their sales channels, their demand creation strategy, their business model, etc. That’s why early stage companies aren’t run by accountants with spreadsheets.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. We had no clue what our market was when we first started.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. Before you go to a trade show sales and marketing need to agree to measurable goals. Then offer those budget dollars to the VP of Sales.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.&# (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Ownership and Teamwork not turf.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. What are Early Stage VC’s Really Asking? Your goal was to preserve your cash while you turned these guesses into facts and searched for a repeatable and scalable sales model.

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David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales. Data companies focused on early-stage startups include Aingel , fundsUP , Preseries , PredictLeads , and Sploda. The Pocket Negotiator is very early-stage attempt to aid in the negotiating process itself.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. This is my new favorite post on your blog.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.) It was still a year away from its IPO. Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Since the training department was part of sales no one really paid attention to the four of us. It was a Friday (about ¾’s through my work week) and I was in a sales department meeting. The VP of Sales gave me a funny look and just moved on with the agenda. VP of Sales? Repeat every day, six or seven days a week.

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

The Customer Validation lesson of, “no formal launch until you have early sales validating the product and sales process&# was also born here. I can’t remember if they were in the Wired article or on the web site, but every once in a while I still go over to ebay and see if I can find any for sale. Order Here.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

Do you know of any similar studies showing correlation between sales success and founder success? The three dropouts above were each, in their own way, some pretty slick sales guys. You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. You just get successful.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Motioning to our VP of Sales, he ordered: “Go with him and get him in front of customers, and both of you don’t come back until you can tell us something we don’t know.” Reply Chui , on October 8, 2009 at 8:05 pm Said: Anyone squirming probably shouldn’t be in sales anyway, and a wise person would have realized it was good advice.

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