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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

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?)

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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. These are markets where it may take 5 or even 10 years to get a product out of the lab and into production. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0

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ConversionXL

OCTOBER 7, 2021

The classic lifespan of successful products is a story in four parts: Introduction Growth Maturity Decline. How this story plays out has a lot to do with the type of product and how it’s improved over time, if at all. In this article, we’ll look at the different stages of the product lifecycle through the lens of marketing.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." Whats wrong with this picture?

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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.

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37signals.com

DECEMBER 5, 2011

Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products. The unimportance of product names. Apr 27 2010. Don’t waste too much time on picking a perfect name for your product. We usually decide upon a product name by seeing what the product does. Everybody knows what a product name should be.

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Product Name Naming Product Software Review 44

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. A year goes by, you miss your revenue plan, and you’ve burned through your first VP of Sales. What happened?

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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. Once the product begins to ship, startup sales execs use orders and revenue as its marker of progress in understanding customers. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 228

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

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If you dont have customers, a product, investors, or a board of directors, you can pretty much stay focused on just one thing at a time. Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n.

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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

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.

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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. After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. They never understood Market Type. End result?

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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.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And once you have a relationship with an author, musician, or journalist, it will be quite easy for them to offer new products and services – and for you to give them feedback that helps them shape ever more interesting (and ever more profitable) offerings. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot?

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ConversionXL

JUNE 9, 2016

In this article, social commerce is defined as the ability to make a product purchase from a third-party company within the native social media experience. For example, you can browse and compare products on Facebook and then make the purchase on Facebook itself vs. going to the company’s site to make the purchase. Image Source.

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Social Media eCommerce Media Audience 48

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. I believe all this advice is wrong. It’s akin to putting lipstick on a pig.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

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.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating. You take your product vision and get out of your building to turn your hypothesis into facts. How does product development differ in communications hardware versus enterprise software, etc.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

Sales people cost money, and when they’re not bringing in revenue, their wandering in the woods is time consuming, cash-draining and demoralizing. are all expensive and potentially fatal distractions if done before you have found product/market fit and a repeatable sales model. Lets see why.

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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. Finally, GM created the notion of perpetual demand within brands by continually obsoleting their own products yearly with new models rolled out every year.

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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.

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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. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 14, 2013

We’re starting here with a conversation about content with Stephanie Hay , the leading voice behind Lean Content , which she describes as “finding the ‘right’ words to acquire customers before building products.” When not at CrossFit, Steph tests content at Work Design Magazine, which she co-launched in 2010. Steph: For me, it leads.

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www.readwriteweb.com

OCTOBER 18, 2010

These are areas that may be gaps in the portfolio of large companies, and are perfect for M&A deals in three to five years after building enough validation and $10-$20 million in revenue. Raymond has built a nice business through efficient distribution deals and will do about $250,000 in revenue this year. 30 million market?

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www.readwriteweb.com

OCTOBER 18, 2010

These are areas that may be gaps in the portfolio of large companies, and are perfect for M&A deals in three to five years after building enough validation and $10-$20 million in revenue. Raymond has built a nice business through efficient distribution deals and will do about $250,000 in revenue this year. 30 million market?

Marketing 52

Marketing Bootstrapping Incubator Angel Investor 52

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 7, 2022

Since I began in 2010, there have been ups and downs, but I wouldn't have it any other way. By establishing a company dedicated to inventive and speedy product development, I am able to use cutting-edge technologies and consistently innovate faster than competitors. 11- Enjoy software products.

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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. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. Noah has been a key figure in the making of LivePlan, our own SaaS product. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. Adriana holds a unique position: Expert in the industry, able to "geek out" with her target customer, yet capable of leading a product team. At best, they could copy.

Software Review 325

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy&# or “our team moves too slow.&# The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day.

San Francisco 164

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

This also literally can’t catch every problem, because your test sandboxes or test clusters will never be exactly like the production system. But I will tell you not to have too little or too much, because those definitely ruin the food or product. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always.

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