Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries. Is it possible to build?

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2021

The key to understanding value propositions is in building interviews that are based on a set of hypotheses (about the problem, the stakeholder and potential solutions to be explored) and data to be captured while using minimum viable products (just enough “product” to increase the efficacy of a conversation and increase the speed of learning).

Curation 344

Curation Technical Review Lean Australia 344

Steve Blank

JUNE 28, 2014

If you can’t see the video click here Filed under: 2 Minute Lessons , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. 2 Minute Lessons Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Teaching'

Customer 313

Customer Search Lean Business Model 313

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Many of them get hung up on understanding how to select the right minimal viable product. He came up with the concept to simply the search for product/market fit by using an MVP Tree. Many startups fall into the trap of building toward a “mission” rather than a minimum viable product (MVP). Your mission is your baby.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2024

Enthusiasm Versus Validation Finding product/market fit is the holy grail for startups. For me, it was a real rush when potential users in a large company loved our slideware and our minimum viable product (MVP). They were ecstatic about the time the product could save them and started pulling others into our demos.

Founder 325

Founder Engineer Sales Conversion 325

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 13, 2015

The Art of the Minimal Viable Product. 2 Minutes to Find Out Why. If you can’t see the video click here Filed under: 2 Minute Lessons , Customer Development. 2 Minute Lessons Customer Development'

Product 120

Product Customer Development Video Developer 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. Were startups failing because of product failures or was there some other failure mode? Reply Best books for the lean product managers — Justin Gibbs , on April 28, 2009 at 2:44 pm Said: [.] What was the difference here? Order Here.

Product Development 143

Product Development Developer Silicon Valley Product 143

Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2017

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining. The other departments gave the same type of logistical answers; the product-marketing department, for example, said their job was to get the product specs from engineering and write data sheets.

Startup 310

Startup PR Public Relations Channel 310

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 13, 2024

The product is an amazing technical tour de force. But the product/market fit of this first iteration is a swing and a miss. launched a product in 1990 called PhotoCD. The moment I saw the product I knew every one of my professional graphics customers (ad agencies, freelancers, photo studios, etc.) would want to use it.

Search 256

Search Marketing Forecast Burn Rate 256

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2014

Two methods, Design Thinking and Customer Development (the core of the Lean Startup) provide the tactical day-to-day process of how to turn ideas into products. . In large companies, the employees are no less smart, but the organization is optimized to deliver repeatable products, revenue and profits.

Customer Development 335

Customer Development Design Developer Customer 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

While our teams have mentors, socialize a lot and give great demos, the goal of our class final presentations is “ Lessons Learned ” – about product/market fit, pricing, acquisition/activation costs, pricing, partners, etc. We heard consistently that the product looked good and solved a problem, but it was not an important problem.

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Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 23, 2023

The larger the company, the more they’ll separate out business development and sales, with business development focused primarily on lead generation and sales focused on sealing the actual sale of the product or service. You just have to go in and work through the mechanics of selling them on your product or service.

Government 212

Government Advisory Board Salary Sales Cycle 212

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 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2020

Pre-pandemic these coffees were usually about what startup to join or how to find product/market fit. Perhaps instead of working for the latest social media or ecommerce company or in retail or travel or hospitality, you might want to make people live healthier, longer and more productive lives.

Software Review 434

Software Review Technical Review eCommerce Salary 434

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2017

Before the rapid rise of Unicorns, (startups with a valuation over a billion dollars), when boards were still in control, they “encouraged” the hiring of “adult supervision” of the founders after they found product/market fit. These new CEOs would also act as a brake to temper the founder’s excesses. And they were right.

Part-Time VPE 308

Part-Time VPE Liquidity Event Stock Engineer 308

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 11, 2020

The second is a preference for product over strategy. Pretotyping is about what to do before the minimum viable product. Doing it well bakes into the system a preference for hypotheses rather than opinions; fast experiments rather than big plans; and testing ideas and strategies, not just products and technologies.

Technical Review 322

Technical Review Taiwan Technology Design 322

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

And when he’d get a positive response he’d show them his first minimal viable product – the mockup he had created of the User Interface in PowerPoint. But I’m having a hard time getting to my next minimal viable product. While I have all this great feedback on my visual mockups I can’t iterate my product.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2019

While these activities shape and build culture, they don’t win wars, and rarely deliver shippable or deployable products. It’s not that these companies are smarter than Defense Department employees, but they operate with different philosophies, different product development methodologies, and with different constraints.

Government 308

Government Artificial Inteligence Silicon Valley North Korea 308

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2014

Most large companies manage three types of innovation: process innovation (making existing products incrementally better), continuous innovation (building on the strength of the company’s current business model but creating new elements) and disruptive innovation (creating products or services that did not exist before.).

Acquisition 332

Acquisition Intellectual Property Silicon Valley Startup 332

Steve Blank

APRIL 3, 2018

Until we start giving grades for resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition, tenacity and having a passion for products and customers, great grades and successful entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation (and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.).

Technical Review 334

Technical Review Entrepreneur Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Frank Robinson of SyncDev has been helping companies figure out their minimum viable product and pivots since 1984, long before I even knew what it meant. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customer development. We shut down production to setup your machine.”

San Jose 256

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 256

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

When Sloan arrived at GM in 1920 he realized that the traditional centralized management structures organized by function (sales, manufacturing, distribution, and marketing) were a poor fit for managing GM’s diverse product lines. I’m really thinking of the factory like a product.” Think of the iPhone and its yearly new models.).

Michigan 268

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 268

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 9, 2020

leading a multi-billion dollar business with a broad range of products and services supporting defense, homeland security, aerospace, infrastructure protection, and customers around the world. And we need to make sure we continually evolve that software, from development, to production to sustainment. it’s all a continuum.

Acquisition 284

Acquisition Technical Review Technology Security 284

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

– while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products. Unlike traditional demo days or Shark Tanks which are, “Here’s how smart I am, and isn’t this a great product, please give me money,” a Lessons Learned presentation tells the story of a team’s 10-week journey and hard-won learning and discovery.

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation - how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.). Customer Discovery in the Real World. You need to propose disruptive solutions.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? Quite a few of the teams were building biotech, devices or digital health products. Scientists and researchers have spent their careers testing hypotheses inside their labs.

SBIR 314

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 314

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

Understanding the left-side of the mission model canvas ( activities, resources , partners , and costs) forces all teams to ask, “Are we building a product for a DOD/IC customer only or do we have a “dual-use” product that could be sold commercially and get funded by venture capital?”. This post is a continuation of the series.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2023

On the business side that turns the product from an incredibly powerful application into an even more incredibly powerful platform that other software developers can plug into and build upon.

ChatGPT 416

ChatGPT Artificial Inteligence Intellectual Property API 416

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. Back then, an entrepreneur used a serial product development process that proceeded step-by-step with little if any customer feedback.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

They are hard to do in a company that excels at products. Visionary CEOs are product and business model centric and extremely customer focused. Visionary CEOs don’t need someone else to demo the company’s key products for them. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. What’s Missing?

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2016

They are hard to do in a company that excels at products. Visionary CEOs are product and business model centric and extremely customer focused. Visionary CEOs don’t need someone else to demo the company’s key products for them. Services (Cloud, ads, music) have a very different business model. What’s Missing?

Azure 120

Azure Business Model Cloud Artificial Inteligence 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2018

I worked with engineering to try to find product/market fit ( big endian or little endian ?) They go from organizations struggling for survival as they search for product/market fit, to building a repeatable and scalable business model, and then growing to profitability. What should I have done? What should my CEO have done?

Part-Time VPE 333

Part-Time VPE Employee Cofounder Hiring 333

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

Start with those around product/market fit – who are your customers and what features do they want? You act as a tactical implementer as you add no insight/or value to product development. You’ll collect a laundry-list of customer feature requests and deliver them to product development, without any insight.

Business Model 305

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 305

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

Value Propositions and Customer Segments are covered in weeks 1 and 2, emphasizing the search for problem/solution and then product/market fit. Activities are not the product/service described in the value prop, they are the unique expertise that the company needs to deliver the value proposition.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’ve been puzzling out what they would need to do to deploy their value proposition (a product, service or both). It’s tough.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’ve been puzzling out what they would need to do to deploy their value proposition (a product, service or both). It’s tough.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120