Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below. Talk about waste.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. 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.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Finally, I’ll write about how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. Our competitor was executing on hypotheses we had developed 9 months ago, and their strategy remained static. See part one for the first time it happened.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

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Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. Martin , on April 10, 2009 at 9:27 am Said: A post that would delight F.A. link] Reply craig sparer , on April 10, 2009 at 5:44 pm Said: So true. In a startup it doesn’t matter if you’re 100% right 100% of the time.

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Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. Reply steveblank , on May 2, 2009 at 1:25 am Said: Your welcome. alancommike , on May 2, 2009 at 11:59 am Said: I’m glad the the presentation was recorded. steve Customer Development is Hard. It starts at ~40:30 in the video.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 139

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# English oops: “You Know Your Getting Close to Your Customers When Your Offer Them a Job.”

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. (No 2009 – Back to The Future The bad news is that since the bubble most VC firms haven’t made a profit. So what’s left?

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. Reply YA , on June 14, 2009 at 10:48 am Said: Interesting. The Adventure of a Lifetime.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

New strategic direction in companies with loyal customers have different consequences then when you had no customers Acquiring new customers are a lot more expensive that converting existing ones. While this sounds inexplicable to an outside observer, sometimes it makes sense.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Graduation day with classmate Joseph Helton (right), killed in action in Iraq in 2009. It was only after returning to Stanford and taking the Lean Launchpad class that I became convinced that a radically different, customer-centric approach was the solution. Filed under: Air Force , Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

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Lean Technical Review Acquisition Software Review 262

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 couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

If you’ve been reading my book on Customer Development and follow my work on Market Type , this type of innovation is best for adding new products to existing markets. In fact the people a large firm needs for this kind of innovation looks suspiciously like startup founders and the processes needed look like Customer Development.

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Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 242

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

After talking to its resellers and customers I realized that SuperMac was the only company that could be described as “fifth in a group of three.” The assets were a series of products already developed and on the market or in the development pipeline. In essence it was a restart with a mixed bag of assets and liabilities.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I began to gain an appreciation of how world-class venture capitalists develop pattern recognition for these common types of problems. “Oh I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. Reply steveblank , on May 11, 2009 at 4:07 pm Said: No.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. Greetings from Crete, Greece Reply Jerry Ji , on April 10, 2009 at 11:09 am Said: Simply _THE BEST_ war story I’ve read in months. Reply How to close a term sheet quickly - Venture Hacks , on April 28, 2009 at 10:43 am Said: [.]

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. Reply gvb , on November 26, 2009 at 10:20 am Said: “Hopefully we won’t run into any wildlife bigger than us (other than our assortment of rattlesnakes, rabbits …).&#

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I liked the fact that you linked to the wikipedia page for a payphone — nice touch Reply Chris Ryland , on October 5, 2009 at 12:06 pm Said: Where did Ben Wegbreit fit in the Convergent picture? Reply steveblank , on October 5, 2009 at 2:08 pm Said: Chris, Ben was the founding VP of Engineering at Ardent.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. In 1962 Wheelon left for a new job as the first director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology where he was responsible for development of OXCART , the A-12 Spyplane, and three major satellite reconnaissance systems.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

It is a skill you need to either have or develop. King James Bible, New Testament – Matthew 7:7 Filed under: Marketing , Technology , Zilog | Tagged: Entrepreneurs , Steve Blank « The Road Not Taken He’s Only in Field Service » 20 Responses Mike Paciello , on July 27, 2009 at 8:54 am Said: Thanks Steve.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. » 8 Responses Strategy versus Relentless Tactical Execution « Yet Another VC Blog , on April 2, 2009 at 6:19 am Said: [.]

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. (The If the product does work, and say we’ve developed a drug that cures a type of cancer, your only problem is how big is the licensing deal going to be – not about whether there will be customers.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System » 20 Responses brantcooper , on March 26, 2009 at 3:52 pm Said: Great story, Steve. I need to look at working in Market Types, however, since the cost of market share acquisition differs drastically, even if the cost of customer acquisition were the same.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Reply Bill Allred , on May 1, 2009 at 10:46 am Said: This is a really common pitfall. If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs : [link] [link] [link] However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. That’s 10x what many websites convert.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

And other startups are in a New Market — creating a market from scratch (like Apple with the iPhone, or iPod/iTunes.) (“Market Type&# radically changes how you sell and market at each step in Customer Development. It’s one of the subtle distinctions that at times gets lost in the process.

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