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. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

More agile competitors are starting to eat into our business. I suggested the best place to start the conversation is with the 21 st century definition of a startup: A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. How can we restart our innovation culture?”.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

A business plan has a set of assumptions (who’s the customer, what’s the price, what’s the channel, what are the product features that matter, etc.) that make up a business model. Yet by first customer ship most of the business model hasn’t been validated or tested. Pivots By Firing Executives.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. PayPal, under the leadership of David Marcus and Bill Scott, re-defining and re-engineering itself by embracing Lean Startup to improve the product experience.

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Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 10, 2011

The VP of an operating division had run into trouble in product development; the product was late and getting later. The revenue plan had the new product baked into the numbers and it was clear that this division General Manager was going to crater his forecast (happens all the time, nothing new here.) Lie to My Face.

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Forecast Agile Revenue Founder 264

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

Execution by Vertical Market As the class progressed, students asked how the activities/functions of a startup; (Sales, Marketing, Business Development, Product Development, etc.) For example, How does sales differ from one market to another? Innovation – Business Model? Technology?

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Is there a profitable business model? The Traditional VC Pitch Entrepreneurs who pursue the traditional product development model don’t have customer data to answer these questions.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

The one-page pitch format is also more suitable for SaaS businesses that are constantly testing new ideas. Your pitch is going to cover your strategy (what you’re going to do), your tactics (how you’re going to do it), your business model (how you will make money), and your schedule (who is doing what and when).

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

Meanwhile, individuals and smaller companies emailed by the hundreds to say that they wanted the features of custom channels, but the sales model—arranged like a media buy—didn’t make sense to them. That is the essence of proving the business in micro-scale.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

To get to this Transition stage, the company needed passionate visionaries who can articulate a compelling vision, agile enough to learn and discover in real time, resilient enough to deal with countless failures, and responsive enough to capitalize on what they learned in order to secure early customers. Planning is another key distinction.

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Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JULY 19, 2010

Adriana has been a psychiatrist for 10 years; she understands the ins and outs of that business. During a lull in her practice she got a serendipitous opportunity to shift gears completely and ended up leading software product development teams. I can see the sales pitch now. Personal authority. That's just one example!

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Software Review Technical Review Development Team Review Bolivia 325

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21 st century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models, while startups search for scalable business models. Other products used and their functions.

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Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

The Next Web

AUGUST 26, 2012

Keep the team small, agile and up-to-date. Remember that raising money in itself is not the purpose; it’s about creating an organization that can fully focus on finding retention and a working business model that can later on scale. KPI’s are different for each start-up. The trick is to find yours as quickly as possible.

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Bankruptcy Technical Review Intellectual Property Due Diligence 121

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

When it was spun out as a a separate company, Iridium’s 1990 business plan had assumptions about potential customers, their problems and the product needed to solve that problem. They made other assumptions about the type of sales channel, partnerships and revenue model they would need. Lessons Learned.

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Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model - first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.). This is the group who will build the company.

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Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

bhargreaves.com

MARCH 7, 2010

But for every entrepreneur who has seriously considered the pluses and minuses of working with a dev shop in the context of the specificities of their business model, there are five who are hiring a dev shop because (a) they are lazy, (b) they don’t know any better, or (c) all of the above. Scissor.com is another agile option.

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Hiring Technical Review Agile Software Review 40

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. You have to know your business model. Most startups launch before theyve figured out what business theyre in. Gattiker said.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In existing companies, the goal of traditional product management and marketing is to develop a market-requirements document (MRD) for engineering that contains the sum of all possible customer feature requests, prioritized in a collaborative effort among Product Management, Marketing, Sales and Engineering.

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Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder 119

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

Because, unless you are working in an extremely static environment, your product development team is learning and getting better all the time. On the one hand, I think they have an urgent problem, and need to invest 100% of their energy into finding a business model (or another form of traction). Great post, Eric.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. Not kind of wrong but going out of business wrong.

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

ConversionXL

APRIL 3, 2019

Go beyond standard sources of voice of customer data ; better options are: Interview founders (the original “customers”); Thank-you page surveys; Usertesting.com; Mine sales calls; Mine support tickets; Mine Facebook comments ; Mine online reviews. Do not talk about disruptive business models; the ones who disrupt don’t talk about it.

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Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Metrics SEO 114

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Github - Free public repositories, collaborator management, issue tracking, wikis, downloads, code review, graphs Pivotal Tracker – Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. WebSequenceDiagrams - sketch sequence diagrams. Lighthouse – Issue Tracking Tool.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

turn customer feedback into sales and relationships. Agile project management tool that enables real time collaboration. Great for visualizing work of product development. Agile project management. agile product management. agile product management and Scrum tool. Agile eLearning.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53