Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s. This methodology improved on waterfall by building software iteratively and involving the customer. With Agile you could end up satisfying every feature a customer asked for and still go out of business.

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Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. This post is part one.

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Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 304

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

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Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 334

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

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.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.

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Customer Business Model Restful Video 419

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. This is a big idea. Corporate KPI’s, Policy and Procedures: Innovation Killers.

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IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. With Netscape’s IPO , there was suddenly a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

A business model diagram also shows how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. And it shows your company’s cost structures, how each department interacts with the others and where your company fits with other companies or partners to implement your business.

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Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals. If so, which one?

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. to optimize this search. What are hypotheses?

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Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter –Customer Discovery in Digital Health. Lessons Learned.

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Lean Customer Development IP Agile 245

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Intel under their last two CEOs delivered more revenue and profit than any ever before. All of Intel’s resources – fabs, manufacturing strategies, and most importantly executive mindset — were geared towards large, expensive x86 processors, not low-cost mobile cores of someone else’s design. But it’s not over for Intel.

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Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. Finally the amount of capital needed to take a drug to FDA trials could be enormously expensive, at least 10x more than startup costs at an electron-based company. Quickly iterate the product in front of customers. Here’s why.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 263

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue? Unlike an org chart, which describes how a company executes to deliver known products to known customers, the business model canvas illustrates the search for the unknowns that most new ventures face.

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Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

More agile competitors are starting to eat into our business. They’ve learned the best distribution channel to get the product from their company to the customer. They’ve figured out the revenue model (subscription, license, direct sale, etc.) Now we’re known for “making the numbers,” living on our past successes.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. It seemed like once a week Yuri would come back from a customer meeting brimming with new insights. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 321

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. This is a fantastic article.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

In practice, how developers respond to this dilemma is determined by their incentives, which are driven by the culture of their team. Who will ultimately bear the cost of their mistakes? It lets the customer and development team spot problems with calculations almost immediately. How severely is failure punished?

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. What is the right revenue model? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? I’ve met a lot of gatekeepers in the past few months. ideas (e.g.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

In a capital scarce environment following the Dot Com crash, startups needed to do more with less and survive long enough to generate revenue. Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. Cash (alone) isn’t king.

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Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

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.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260

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.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. Portals that want to unify news, communication, tools, etc. Simplify, simplify, simplify.

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Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version. Here the key is for your free customers to get value from the site that is greater than the costs they perceive by the fact that youre selling access to them. Is it that they act as free advertising for our premium product?

San Francisco 148

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 148

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2013

Visiting each official site took too long, and the information wasn’t always easy to compare (ex: “Net Cost of Attendance” vs. “Resident Tuition per Semester”). We resolved to build out the first dozen comparisons before we started calculating an exact cost per new market. Lean Start-up Connection: Customer Development.

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Lean Agile Customer Development SEO 299

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

You cannot draw a direct line to reducing waste or improving revenues or cutting costs…whereas the cross-functional teams, you can tie it to a performance metric that has a direct result in the corporate objectives. You’ve got your validated learning with the customer development you’ve been doing with your own market segment.

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Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. The Proof Is In The Revenue. D&O insurance is a “cost of respect” for board members. What went wrong?

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

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. The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. The real motivation in all this was passion.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Ship more infrequently While this may decrease downtime (things break and you roll back), the cost on development time from work and rework will be large, and mistakes will continue to slip through. Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. But, unfortunately, startups cant afford to adopt that standard.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

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Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 329

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs. Just because something looks pretty, or feels like a good idea, or has a lot of sunk cost in it, does not mean it should be pursued. Not even if its generating revenue. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

When Iridium was first conceived inside Motorola in 1987, worldwide cell phone coverage was sparse, calls were unreliable and per minute costs were expensive. Cell phone handsets were the size of a lunch box and cost thousand of dollars. Customer Development, Business Model Design and Agile Development could have changed the outcome.

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Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156