Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. These were inspiring stories, but I realized that, no surprise, the popular press were writing books that had mass appeal. Where were the books explaining why were all these chip and computer companies started here?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. How quickly will you recover? Can you recognize and capitalize on them?

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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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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. Ultimately you want to see if you can find customers and a market for the product as specified – as early as possible.

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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.

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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. See the previous Ardent posts for context.) The problem was I didn’t have a clue.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

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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. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

Technology 142

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We can’t bring customers to this rundown building. I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building&# debacle I had a hand in. We made what seemed to be a series of logical and rational decisions about what to do with our next office building. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other?

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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. A few successful ones do all these things.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

I place them roughly in this order: Movies > Television > Books > Music > Magazines > Radio > Newspapers Each industry is watching the one in front of it sink into the quicksand. 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.

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View from Seed

APRIL 8, 2020

Stevens has held roles across verticals such as head of sales, marketing, product, and professional services at five startups over twenty years. Understand Your Customer and Their Timelines. Which is they’re flexible and agile. Retaining Customers in a Recession. Think about our current situation in two phases: 1.

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crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 13, 2010

Inspiration – Beautiful Book Cover Designs – [link]. 3 Internet Tools To Market Your Books Better and Faster – [link]. Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model – [link]. Small business and customer service: 3 tips for creating a virtuous loop – [link].

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crowdSPRING Blog

APRIL 13, 2010

Inspiration – Beautiful Book Cover Designs – [link]. 3 Internet Tools To Market Your Books Better and Faster – [link]. Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic – Pivoting the Business Model – [link]. Small business and customer service: 3 tips for creating a virtuous loop – [link].

Social Media 95

Social Media Small Business Design Media 95

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 268

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

This lack of information meant that every World War II movie or book that had airplanes on bombing missions in it was wrong. And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) Every one of them. (To To someone who had grown up with reruns of WWII war movies on TV, this was a shock.)

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit.

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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. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.”

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc.

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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. 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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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. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. Reply Bill Allred , on May 1, 2009 at 10:46 am Said: This is a really common pitfall.

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Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 24, 2018

He is a business strategist, author of three books, including the book we’re gonna talk about today, The Leadership Contact: The Fine Print to Becoming an Accountable Leader. John Jantsch: So let’s … So often there are key words in the titles of books that need to be unpacked a little bit. Is that society?

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Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2009

Filed under: Secret History of Silicon Valley « Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA Rocket Science 2: Drinking the Kool-Aid » 2 Responses Ben , on July 1, 2009 at 2:31 pm Said: Great post Steve. It’s interesting that the NY Times obituary makes no mention of Ted Hall.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

College Dropouts - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison These guys realized that customers don’t ask for your transcript. You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. You just get successful. Google is looking to hire workers. They found companies.

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YoungUpstarts

JUNE 5, 2014

Masterful execution makes up one of the triangle’s two vertical sides. (I It’s the third side of the triangle — the oft-neglected, misunderstood, and underfunded soft edge — that constitutes my book. A strong soft edge makes a company resilient and agile — even in the face of the occasional C-suite disagreement.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

But unlike the majority of existing tube manufacturers in the valley who were making products for radios, Stanford Electronics Research Lab tube group had a special customer with very special needs – the U.S. Air Force also needed improvements in frequency agility to protect its cold war bombers.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Sometimes it was the legal department crafting contracts so onerous I wouldn’t even sign it, let alone expect a customer to do so.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Rapid Scan/High Probability of Intercept – Stanford’s contribution In the last post we described Stanford’s high power, electronically tuned microwave tubes (the Backward Wave Oscillator ) which made high power, frequency agile airborne jammers possible.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. Given we consciously worked hard not to, here’s what we were thinking. Do the right thing.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2009

The reality is that independent electric vehicle startups will win over time (closer to the customer, more agile, etc.) Martin , on April 15, 2009 at 9:38 am Said: But the biggest problem with the Volt is that customers don’t want electric cars right now. with the auto bailout. with the auto bailout.

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Duct Tape Marketing

DECEMBER 17, 2019

She’s also got a new book called Social Media Success for Every Brand: the five StoryBrand Pillars That Turn Posts Into Profits. And for a while I was working on the vertical of religion. ” John Jantsch: But I do think that that this idea of the customer journey has become even more and more important.

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Steve Blank

MAY 13, 2009

Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] Reply Gravity Will Be Turned Off « Avid Editor’s Insights , on May 17, 2009 at 1:31 am Said: [.] entire story can be found at Steve Blank. It’s worth a few minutes time off from reaming [.]

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Sure the rest of the stories diverge though… can’t really imagine a Soviet counterpart to the Customer Development method. Reply Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank , on June 29, 2009 at 7:02 am Said: [.] Reply Ben C. , The invention of electronic warfare, part I and II. [.]

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blog.expensify.com

APRIL 24, 2012

If you want to serve enterprise customers,NET is one of the best ways to do that and do it well. The tools which you find restrictive I consider a huge timesaver (which paying customers tend to appreciate)… they allow me to rapidly prototype and get solutions to customers. lorf: NET supports JAVA. CEO Friday?

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