Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. Let’s Fire Our Customers Part of the DNA of great entrepreneurs is a bias towards decisive and immediate action. Get it done, now.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 201

YoungUpstarts

MAY 30, 2014

After all, Gmail wasn’t taken out of beta until 2009 — five years after it was originally released. Improved customer satisfaction. Improved customer satisfaction often goes hand in hand with increased sales. When customers like your product, they tell their friends, and then their friends tell their friends.

Customer 186

Customer Development Team Review Cofounder Agile 186

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

Reply John Muldoon , on July 9, 2009 at 1:52 pm Said: This was really fabulous to watch. I think customer feedback comes in a very unstructured manner, hence it is difficult to apply an algorithm on it. to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. How do I get in the room next time? Order Here.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 125

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 12, 2022

Bitcoin is a digital currency that was created in 2009 by an unknown programmer, or group of programmers. Bitcoin has grown in popularity since its inception in 2009 becoming the top cryptocurrency available. Bitcoin value increased exponentially since 2009 when it was worth less than a dollar. What is Bitcoin? Conclusion.

Technical Review 113

Technical Review Software Review Open Source Mobile 113

Both Sides of the Table

SEPTEMBER 15, 2022

In 2009 we could take a long time to review a deal. We could talk with customers, meet the entire management team, review financial plans, review customer purchasing cohorts, evaluate the competition, etc. Of course our execution against the strategy has had to change but the strategy has remained constant.

Technical Review 416

Technical Review Pre-Money Valuation San Francisco Valuation 416

Brandanew

AUGUST 14, 2016

Can you change your brand DNA and begin to weave stories with customers? Social Trends Podcast : We Are Storytellers Weaving Stories With Customers. We started thinking and creating such products more suited to different archetypes of customers. What does it take to create a big brand? Production : Brandanew.co

Customer 150

Customer India Honduras Detroit 150

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. Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.”

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

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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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

abovethecrowd.com

DECEMBER 18, 2017

While other industries often speak of being “customer centric” or “putting the customer first,” the U.S. healthcare system rarely thinks of the patient as a customer. healthcare market is the least customer centric of any customer service industry. One could go even farther, and suggest that the U.S.

Customer 59

Customer Technical Review Venture Capital Software Review 59

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. They are gaining valuable customer data.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Oh, and we had no installed customer base. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers. Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal. This was my fault.

Silicon Valley 327

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 327

Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Our first question was, did the total number of customers that had already bought products from our competitors and us represent a saturated market or the tip of the iceberg? Since I was heading a marketing department, not acting as an individual contributor, I needed to teach all of marketing the importance of customer data.

Silicon Valley 136

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 136

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. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

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. The breakthrough idea of agile is that software should be built iteratively, with the pieces that customers value most created first. Enter Jims post.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Lessons to Learn By the time I joined Ardent I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit. At Ardent I learned many of them with a sharp smack on the side of the head from a brilliant but abusive boss.

Silicon Valley 275

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 275

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I have personally sold many copies of his book, and continue to recommend it as one of the most important books a startup founder can read.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

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.&# Context here.)

Engineer 205

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 205

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 26, 2009 A real Customer Advisory Board A reader recently asked on a previous post about the technique of having customers periodically produce a “state of the company&# progress report. Many companies seek to involve customers directly in the creation of their products.

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Advisory Board Customer San Francisco Lean 151

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. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked.

Silicon Valley 232

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 232

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. The most common mistake startups make is assuming they can operate the same way big companies do, and expect success with little to no feedback from potential customers. This is a customer development problem.

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Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.

Silicon Valley 279

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 279

Software By Rob

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

He also looked at calculating the cost of a customer acquisition (COCA) and a customer’s lifetime value (LTV), as well as the customer happiness index (CHI) which is a good indicator of how long they will stay your customer. photos by [link] November 16th, 2009 | Cool News, Links & Reviews Building your startup?

Software Review 47

Software Review Software San Francisco RSS 47

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Cray’s first customers were the U.S. At Ardent our hypothesis was that if we could build a desktop supercomputer powerful enough to run and display these numerical simulations there were enough customers to make this a big business. I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications.

Silicon Valley 151

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 151

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. In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? 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.

Cofounder 223

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 223

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. The Adventure of a Lifetime. My good friends and I lived in a house together working on 2 start-ups and we would call the house Sarajevo.

Entrepreneur 282

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 282

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Or offer some real insights into our customers? It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We Was she going to propose a coherent communications strategy?

Silicon Valley 192

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 192

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc.

Silicon Valley 302

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 302

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 4, 2018

That revenue is in on 75,000 customers, earned through the hard work of 500 employees across six offices on three continents. Every day, 5% of the entire online world visits a customer running on the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform. I’ve always said nothing beats the high of getting that first customer to sign up.

Engineer 152

Engineer Revenue San Francisco Security 152

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, December 14, 2009 Business ecology and the four customer currencies Lately, I’ve been rethinking the concept of “business model&# for startups, in favor of something I call “business ecology.&# Let’s begin with the four customer currencies.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 29, 2014

If you’ve gotten 100 customers you can probably get another 100 in a similar way. One way to understand why 2x is plausible but 20x requires innovation, is to observe that the actions that got you your first 10 customers are probably not sufficient for generating 100, even though they’re probably sufficient for getting another 10.

Software Review 300

Software Review Technical Review Startup Channel 300

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation. The heart of the Cafepress presentation is the “ Lessons Learned from our Customers ” section. The VC firm delivered a term sheet for an 8-digit second round that afternoon.

Venture Capital 216

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 216

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 14, 2008 How to listen to customers, and not just the loud people Frequency is more important than talking to the "right" customers, especially early on. Youll know when the person youre talking to is not a potential customer - they just wont understand what youre saying.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc. Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And that’s just to get started. Comments and brickbats welcomed.

Founder 302

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

But underlying the company’s existence was a fundamental hypothesis we refused to see or test - customers would care if we did. Our potential customers didn’t seem to be calling for Hollywood stories, characters and narrative. Our customers wanted to kill, shoot or hunt for something. That’s OK, because we knew better.

Silicon Valley 212

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 212

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. By 1961 its customers now included our intelligence agencies. Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 176