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Is the Lean Startup Dead?

Steve Blank

First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit). Startups with huge burn rates – building leases, staff, PR and advertising – ran out of money. It has to find product-market fit before running out of cash.

Lean 335
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The Customer Development Manifesto: The Startup Death Spiral (part.

Steve Blank

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. Without the revenue to match its expenses, the company is in now danger of running out of money.

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Crisis Management by Firing Executives – There’s A Better Way

Steve Blank

Now the company is in crisis mode because the rest of the organization (product development, marketing, etc.) Each block in the business model canvas maps to hypotheses in the Customer Discovery and Validation steps of Customer Development. The alternative to firing and crises is the Business Model/Customer Development process.

Burn Rate 247
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Vision versus Hallucination – Founders and Pivots

Steve Blank

Tossing their agile development process and at times their entire business model in the air, the company would go into fire-drill mode and engineering would start working on whatever his latest insight was. he’d declare. “We We got to pivot now.”

Founder 316
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Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners.

Steve Blank

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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Lean Startups aren't Cheap Startups

Steve Blank

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.

Lean 244
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Lessons Learned: Cash is not king

Startup Lessons Learned

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). Combining agile development with customer developm.