Steve Blank

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Why Too Many Startups (er) Suck

Steve Blank

The product is so good, helpful, and easy to use that it literally almost does its own marketing organically through the product’s viral nature, just as Hotmail and Gmail have done since inception. It scaled like lightning by solving an urgent, painful problem for millions of consumers. What’s the honest trajectory?

Startup 332
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New Rules for the New Internet Bubble

Steve Blank

VC’s engineered financial transactions, working with entrepreneurs to brand, hype and take public un profitable companies with grand promises of the future. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Thus began the 5-year dot-com bubble. Wide Adoption.

Internet 334
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The Lean LaunchPad – Teaching Entrepreneurship as a Management Science

Steve Blank

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. ——————– Engineering 245. Actually engage in “search engine marketing” (SEM)spend $20 as a team to test customer acquisition cost. Below is the class syllabus.

Wiki 311
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A Path to the Minimum Viable Product

Steve Blank

It’s lazy thinking (and expensive engineering) to try to build for both at the same time. It has a growth engine. There are two viable growth engines for tech companies: Viral, or “inherently viral” growth: Customers either intentionally or unintentionally recruit new customers by using your product.

Product 436
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What Do I Do Now? The Startup Lifecycle

Steve Blank

Sales (and/or customer acquisition in a multi-sided market) becomes achievable by a sales force (or network effect or virality) without heroic efforts from the founders. Customer acquisition and activation are understood and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Life Time Value (LTV) can be estimated for the next 18 months.

Lean 120
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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 44: Jacqueline Ros and Christina Stembel

Steve Blank

Then she went to work on the technology: I hired some contract engineers who used to work on the Life Alert product to build us a really dinky prototype that you could plug into the wall. We naively thought we would have a viral campaign, but it took us 4 months to create and cost us $25,000.

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How to Raise Money – It’s a Journey Not An Event

Steve Blank

You’ve built detailed analytics tracking into your product and you should be seeing organic and viral growth; and can provide Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users, 30d/90d/120d retention. The goal is to iterate on building a repeatable engine for growth that makes the economics work. 2M in 18 months. 2M in 18 months.

Cofounder 429