Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

The other departments in marketing gave the same answers; the product-marketing department said their job was to write data sheets. And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Silicon Valley 267

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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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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. aka: An Open Letter to the Next Big Social Network) - 500 Hats , November 1, 2010 I've held off writing this post for a long time, because I couldn't quite get my head around all the issues. but: Something is Still Missing.

Technical Review 175

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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 266

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I have been working on getting a startup to revenue for a while, and while this is my 4th iteration and I have not yet succeeded, I’ve been learning new things every time. 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.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product. is whether there is a customer and market for the product as spec’d. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk. Based on this insight, I updated my earlier diagram to look like this. (The

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 154

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? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal. What’s going on?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. What happened? I cover this in the Four Steps to the Epiphany.)

Silicon Valley 137

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. And the product that “talked to me&# , the loudest and most seductively, was the one that went home with me.

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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.

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 267

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, January 15, 2010 Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable (for Harvard Business Review) The next part in the series I am writing for Harvard Business Review is online. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

This condition makes it much easier for teams to innovate, experiment, and achieve sustained productivity. One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production. Continuous deployment also acts as a speed regulator.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company. Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

San Francisco 161

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity. VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 88

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. My 2008 revenues were over $100k on a 35k inventory. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The business plan is a wonderful document for organizing and planning for existing companies to launch follow-on products. This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination. Business Plan vs. Business Model + Customer Development.

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Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 266

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation.

San Francisco 102

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

Describing your product as “new and “never been done before” instead of “we’re just like those others guys, but better” could cost your company billions. Soon, RIM was focusing on making products for people on the move, using wireless communication and digital data. Underneath the hood RIM’s product was a technical tour de force.

Hockey Stick 275

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Others emphasize how to build a product. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. Therefore we developed a class to teach students how to think about all the parts of building a business, not just the product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Customers will get to consume the content they want, and support the producers of that content directly, rather than having to rely exclusively on intermediaries. The key tools of this new marketing are: targeting, filtering, and customer insight. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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ConversionXL

JULY 1, 2014

What do you do when you have a new product coming out, you know the product is good because people who have used say so. You go and run a qualitative survey on those people who clicked through but didn’t buy the product of course! Remember how Noah asked the people who had clicked through but had not purchased the product?

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Customer Design Software Review Lead Generation 76

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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that. Lets see why.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Most customers of most products hate new releases. Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. Achieving consensus about every corner case from each stakeholder in the room is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.)

Silicon Valley 191

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

In hindsight it appeared clear that startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community. Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development.

Silicon Valley 130

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan realized that the traditional centralized management structures (like General Motors had in 1920) were poor fits for the management of GM’s already diverse product lines. The idea was to keep customers coming back to General Motors over time to upgrade to a better brand as they became wealthier. auto market with 60% of the U.S.

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 170

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a. We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. It was still a year away from its IPO. Agilent is a $5.8

Silicon Valley 177

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 16, 2010 Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium (Normally, I do not write about companies that are doing a marketing launch. First, SlideShare is a fantastic product (that I use on a regular basis) and an impressive company example of Lean Startup practices in action.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

Jessica Mah started InDinero in 2010 to help entrepreneurs with their accounting and tax needs after going through the same challenges with her own businesses. Their initial product was nice-to-have, but people didn’t want to pay for it, Jessica explained: Everything was going so well. And download any of the past shows here.).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. Over-communicate with employees, investors, customers. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. Offer equity instead of cash.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product? We're keeping ourselves free for the community that has helped us build our product; premium vs basic seems wrong to us.

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

How much longer until they start compromising their products or service under other dubious exercises in logic. Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based. Also, his #1 advice for getting coverage on TechCrunch was to make a great product. I’m not buying it… literally.

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