Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

We knew from back-of-the-envelope calculations that I would need 3 times the combined marketing and sales budgets of the incumbents for a head-on assault. (I The 3:1 Lanchester Laws said I would need $60M in marketing and sales spending to win. If we tried to match them on their playing field we’d never catch up.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. If they don’t, there are a new breed of lean startups who understand this deep in the bones ready to take their place.

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Reid Hoffman

MARCH 2, 2021

She worked as a sales clerk at a fashion company called Celine. I still remember it – she used to shop at those kinds of places, and she had to become a sales clerk. The way that Travis had set up Uber was a kind of vertical stack, very loosely coupled efforts, and any GM was essentially the CEO of their own city.

Iran 39

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical.

Video 184

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

You can imagine the rest of the conversation; my sounding reluctant to let our own tests outside our building, the magazines begging us to let them have them, and finally a deal gets struck where we let the benchmarks out to the test labs of these magazines under their own name “The Potrero Benchmark Suite” without attribution to us.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. Stay hungry, stay lean. I don’t want to be hungry and lean (nor do I want to be full and fat). It was an odd feeling at that time, we thought we have made it and fail to stay lean and hungry. That’s when things went south. Don’t let it happen to you.

Silicon Valley 230

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. In the Fall of 2008, the credit crisis wiped out mergers and acquisitions as a path to liquidity as M&A collapsed with the rest of the market. On its first day of trading, Netscape stock closed at $58/share, valuing the company at $2.7 So what’s left?

Silicon Valley 235

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched. How did your skills in sales and marketing and your ability to discover and validate customers run aground at Rocket Science? All that is, except for our lobby, as our offices were on the 4 th floor.

Silicon Valley 137

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

His marketing and sales instincts and skills seemed magical and he built the company into a $400 million OEM supplier, ultimately selling the company to Unisys. A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. But this story is not about Convergent.

Entrepreneur 291

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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

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.

Silicon Valley 203

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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. It was so out of character, people were shocked.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

A+ in one or two courses every semester and mediocre in the rest. 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. This was basically my m.o. in school. They do great stuff.

Silicon Valley 332

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.) Gary Hoover Reply Michael F.

Silicon Valley 179

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YoungUpstarts

JUNE 5, 2014

Masterful execution makes up one of the triangle’s two vertical sides. (I And Stoddard notes that at NetApp they use proper governance to facilitate faster learning: “We use an enterprise executive architecture committee, with all the leaders of every NetApp function — marketing, sales, HR, operations, finance, and so on.

Algorithm 174

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mobile.smashingmagazine.com

JANUARY 16, 2013

local sales, disasters, city or regional politics, concerts). A mobile-optimized structure, however, leans towards a “taller” arrangement in addition to hierarchies. In each page, seek one sentence that sums up the rest of the page. Or maybe this article sets the ground for the sales pitch of such system.

Mobile 101

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Some engineers were insulted that we were going to slow down their board and sales was convinced that within days of the board hitting the street we would have a black market in chips to speed up the $699 boards and turn them into $3,999 ones. The reaction inside our company could not be described as polite. No one believed it would work.

Silicon Valley 145

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crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

According to a study examining the effect of color on sales, 92.6% Horizontal vs vertical vs diagonal lines. Unlike vertical or diagonal lines, they look as though gravity has already acted upon them and there is nowhere for them to fall. This means that horizontal is the most restful and stable line position.

Marketing 162

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blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

oz burgers as fast as possible, and commit the rest of your career to an endless series of McDonalds menus. The rest of us have some fine dining to enjoy. I doubt anything can beat it the rest of this year. It’s like arguing against vertical software. Self-aggrandizing blowhards like yourself are a dime a dozen.

Java 107

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Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Other tools, can provide more dimensions including children, political leanings, ethnicity etc… You can see how this might be a lot more interesting for a magazine or content sites, and perhaps a lot less to other types of businesses. I find this behavior to be a million times more useful than demographics or political leanings.

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