Apple Vision Pro – Tech in the Search of a Market
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 13, 2024
Marketing and capital expenses (new factory, high R&D expense) were predicated on consumer-scale sales.
Steve Blank
Why Founders Should Know How to Code
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 3, 2014
Dave was building a mobile app for matching college students who needed to move within a local area with potential local movers. One interesting thing about the Lean Startup is that it teaches founders about Sales and Marketing (and a bit of finance) without making them get an MBA or a decade of sales experience.
Cofounder 
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Why Some Startups Win
Steve Blank
MARCH 15, 2017
His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing. After a few months of talking to customers and working with sales, we defined the marketing Mission (our job) as: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin.
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It Must Be A Marketing Problem
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 11, 2010
CEO – “Well, we’ve missed our sales numbers for the last six months.” What does this have to do with missing your sales plan? CEO – “Well our VP of Sales isn’t making the sales plan and he says it’s a marketing problem, and he’s a really senior guy.”. The CEO asks the VP of Sales to join us in the conference room.
Burn Rate 248
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Honor and Recognition in Event of Success
Steve Blank
MARCH 2, 2011
A Sales Closer – a salesman who can make up the sales process on the fly and bring in deals without a datasheet, price list or roadmap. They will build the sales team that follows. The good news/bad news is that you’ll spend ½ your time on airplanes listening to customers.).
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The Phantom Sales Forecast – Failing at Customer Validation
Steve Blank
JULY 22, 2010
Startup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Here’s an example in a direct sales channel. He went through his product feature by feature and matched them to the customer problems. Sales Process. Next, he took me through his sales process. We have a great sales pipeline.” Too Good to Be True.
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Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores.
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 looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.
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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 4: Customer Hypotheses
Steve Blank
APRIL 4, 2011
The Agora team started the week wondering whether they were 1) a true marketplace for cloud computing, where they provide both matching and exchange capabilities for real-time trading. Or were they 2) an information exchange, providing matching services for cloud computing buyers and sellers, providing matching services.
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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 7, 2009
This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. No one wants to sit next to the VP of Sales.
The Virus Survival Strategy For Your Startup
Steve Blank
MARCH 17, 2020
All your assumptions about customers, sales cycle and most importantly, revenue, burn rate and runway are no longer true. If you are selling to businesses (a B-to-B market) have your customers’ sales dropped? If so, whatever revenue forecast and sales cycle estimates you had are no longer valid. Or you change sales strategy.
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SuperMac War Story 6: Building The Killer Team – Mission, Intent.
Steve Blank
APRIL 9, 2009
Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.
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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 39: Jeremy Johnson and Michael Eidsaune
Steve Blank
AUGUST 15, 2016
Andela selects and trains world-class tech talent from Africa and matches them with U.S. We were charging a really high up-front annual fee to these providers and the end result of that was a pretty long sales cycle. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. The problem was had the wrong business model at the time.
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Bonfire of the Vanities
Steve Blank
AUGUST 5, 2011
When I was in my 20’s, I was taught the relationship between marketing and sales over a bonfire. And once we went public, we hired a veteran VP of Sales from Honeywell. As we typically did, I printed up several thousand to send out to the sales force. Why don’t you come over to corporate. What the heck??” A marshmallow roast?
Silicon Valley 267
267 Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 20: Nayeem Hussain and Will Zell
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 10, 2016
Your product and company vision needs to match your appetite for funding. He stressed that your product and company vision needs to match your appetite for funding: One thing that we learned very early on was, have a plan for fund-raising. … But it’s sales that really drive your progress with those three groups of people.
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Entrepreneurs are Everywhere Show No. 39: Jeremy Johnson and Michael Eidsaune
Steve Blank
AUGUST 15, 2016
Andela selects and trains world-class tech talent from Africa and matches them with U.S. We were charging a really high up-front annual fee to these providers and the end result of that was a pretty long sales cycle. If you can’t hear the clip, click here. The problem was had the wrong business model at the time.
Cofounder 120
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Death By Revenue Plan
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 16, 2010
In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. The VC’s were very concerned that the revenue the financial plan called for wasn’t being delivered by the sales team. Lets Try to Make the World Match Our Spreadsheet.
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230 Search versus Execute
Steve Blank
MARCH 5, 2012
Unlike existing companies that fire executives when they fail to match a plan, we keep the founders and change the model. In contrast, execution, (which follows search) requires the company to be organized by function (product management, sales, marketing, business development, etc.). And most of the time these experiments fail.
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320 SuperMac War Story 4: Repositioning SuperMac – “Market Type” at.
Steve Blank
MARCH 25, 2009
If we tried to match them on their playing field we’d never catch up. 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.
Silicon Valley 141
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Tesla and Adobe: Why Continuous Deployment May Mean Continuous Customer Disappointment
Steve Blank
JANUARY 6, 2014
Agile is a tremendous advance in reducing time, money and wasted product development effort – and in having products better match customer needs. When next year’s model arrived, they did not expect that the Ford station wagon or Maytag washer they purchased last year would be updated to match all the features in the new model.
The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 5: Customer Relationship Hypotheses
Steve Blank
APRIL 15, 2011
The team put together their sales funnel and started testing demand. The Agora team ended last week wondering whether they were 1) a true marketplace for cloud computing, where they provide both matching and exchange capabilities for real-time trading. The results were disappointing. This week they answered the question by “punting.”
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What Do I Do Now? The Startup Lifecycle
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 12, 2015
It typically takes multiple iterations and pivots to find product/market fit – the match between what you’re building and who will buy it. 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.
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120 The Peter Pan Syndrome–The Startup to Company Transition
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
While he had designed a good part of the product, he now found himself the titular head of sales and marketing. We’re trying to solve a puzzle in sales. We’re suddenly getting our butts kicked in our sales to the government.”. Last year they had done over $50 million in sales. A Killer Sales Culture. “My
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272 Crisis Management by Firing Executives – There’s A Better Way
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 18, 2010
You can almost set your watch to six months or so after first customer ship, when Sales starts missing its “numbers,” the board gets concerned and Marketing tries to “make up a better story.” The web site and/or product presentation slides start changing and Marketing and Sales try different customers, different channels, new pricing, etc.
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247 Who Dares Wins – The 2nd Annual International Business Model Competition
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 16, 2012
But for startups, business plans fail to match the chaotic reality they encounter in the real world. Large companies had VP’s of Sales and Marketing, so VC’s made startups organize that way as well. And that instead of firing executives to match a plan, it was the plan itself that needed to rapidly iterate.
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At times not losing is as important as winning
Steve Blank
AUGUST 17, 2012
Joe Dinucci, our VP of Sales, was hot on the trail of our next big order. After seeing the demo, the CFO walked Joe over to the office of Autodesk’s VP of sales, and said to her, “I think this product might solve your sales reporting problem.”. At the time Autodesk’s sales organization was frustrated with their IT department.
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Entrepreneurship for the 99%
Steve Blank
JUNE 4, 2012
To do this we needed to do is change the end goals and implementation details to match the aspirations and realities that these new small businesses face. Sitting by the pond we had a second epiphany: we could easily adjust the Lean LaunchPad class to bring 21 st century entrepreneurship techniques to ‘Main Street’.
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Let's Fire Our Customers
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 24, 2009
When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” 5) The customer’s needs don’t match your long term direction. 2) They don’t care about your profitibility and ultimately, your staying power.
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195 Building a Company with Customer Data – Why Metrics Are Not Enough
Steve Blank
DECEMBER 17, 2009
You assemble this view by gathering information from a variety of sources: web sites, social media (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, et al) sales data, win/loss information, market research data (i.e. At the same time, they can gauge how well industry data and the actual sales match the company’s revenue and market-share expectations.
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239 Turning on your Reality Distortion Field
Steve Blank
APRIL 22, 2010
As I listened to him present the problems of matching lithium-ion battery packs to EV powertrains and direct drive motors, I realized that he had a built a product for a segment of the electric vehicle market that possibly could put his company on the right side of a major industry discontinuity. I’m not a sales guy I’m an engineer.&#.
Elevator Pitch 251
251 The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 3: Value Proposition Hypotheses
Steve Blank
MARCH 25, 2011
What sort of sales structure and salesforce does it require? Is a buying guide/matching service a superior value proposition to marketplace? We also described the differences between customers in Business-to-business sales versus business-to-consumer sales. How do we access the buyers and sellers?
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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Marketing Communications
Steve Blank
APRIL 5, 2017
My engineers say our website is old school, and we need to be on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, my VP of Sales says we’re wasting our marketing dollars not targeting the right people and my board keeps giving me their opinions of how we should describe our product and company. How do I sort out what to do?”. with a strategy.
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How To Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act
Steve Blank
APRIL 1, 2020
Sales pipeline/forecast. I listened in on a board call with an enterprise software company this week, and when the CEO said, “Our VP of sales assured me our pipeline won’t be affected.” Then walk them through why the changes you’re suggesting match that plan. Internal Assessment. Operating Numbers.
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Fear of Failure and Lack of Speed In a Large Corporation
Steve Blank
MARCH 11, 2015
And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. They’ve figured out the revenue model (subscription, license, direct sale, etc.)
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120 Welcome to the Lost Decade (for Entrepreneurs, IPO’s and VC’s)
Steve Blank
JULY 15, 2010
startups require significantly less capital to start, 2) exits for venture firms are predominately acquisitions, and 3) a venture firm with a smaller fund <$150M matches these exits. If you’re starting a software company, your exit is most likely a sale to a larger company. are example of this class of firm.
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297 Can You Trust Any vc's Under 40?
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 14, 2009
Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. On its first day of trading, Netscape stock closed at $58/share, valuing the company at $2.7
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217 The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 7: Revenue Model
Steve Blank
APRIL 28, 2011
In talking to their sales channel (farm equipment dealers) and customers (organic farmers) they realize they have an opportunity to come up with a unique revenue stream. They believed they could build tools that would save customers 30% of their Amazon bill by provide service matching, capacity planning and usage monitoring & control.
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Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1 « Steve Blank
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. If there aren’t any that match your company, create some.
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Teaching Entrepreneurship – The “Survey” Class
Steve Blank
APRIL 5, 2010
Students formed teams, came up with a business idea then talked to customers, vendors and sales channel partners to validate their business model. By getting out of the building on a team project, the class helped students viscerally understand that a startup is a search for a profitable business model.
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126 Coffee With Startups
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. This is easy to test. Do this before you write code you may end up throwing away.
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181 Pixar, Artists, Founders and Corporate Innovation
Steve Blank
OCTOBER 27, 2015
While I’m sure Ed Catmull doesn’t remember, when Pixar was a startup selling the Image Computer , their VP of Sales and Marketing brought me in to put together their marketing strategy. Say what? I kicked myself knowing that I should have thought of Pixar. Like a startup.). It Starts With a Vision.
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120 Rocket Science 4: The Press is Our Best Product
Steve Blank
JULY 13, 2009
It wasn’t that I didn’t have a smart VP of Marketing who was getting early feedback from customers and screaming that the games didn’t match the hype. The Customer Validation lesson of, “no formal launch until you have early sales validating the product and sales process&# was also born here. Order Here.
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How to Raise Money – It’s a Journey Not An Event
Steve Blank
FEBRUARY 26, 2020
For a Series A round you want to prove you have built a repeatable and scalable sales/revenue model and understand all parts of the business model. Product/market fit means that you’ve found the match between your potential customers’ pains, gains and jobs to be done and the features of your minimal viable product. 2M in 18 months.
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Hacking a Corporate Culture: Stories, Heroes and Rituals in Startups and Companies
Steve Blank
SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
Corporate innovation needs a culture that matches and supports it. When any special custom engineering effort was required to match the over-the-top sales commitments (almost every deal), the engineers were treated as heroes as well. . —– Corporate Innovation Requires an Innovation Culture.
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Raising Money Using Customer Development
Steve Blank
NOVEMBER 5, 2009
Your goal was to preserve your cash while you turned these guesses into facts and searched for a repeatable and scalable sales model. We also talk about cash flow management rather than fund-raising though – watch and justifying expenses by cash coming in that matches or exceeds.
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