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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution.

Steve Blank

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

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Solving the Innovator’s Dilemma – Customer Development in a Big Company

Steve Blank

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. It reminded me of the differences in Customer Discovery between a scalable startup and a big company.

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Why Founders Should Know How to Code

Steve Blank

A startup is not just about the idea, it’s about testing and then implementing the idea. I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. In fact, it wasn’t even a startup.

Cofounder 336
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The Lean LaunchPad Class: It’s the same, but different

Steve Blank

The class was unique in that it was 1) team-based, 2) experiential, 3) lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering). When we started this class, the concept of Lean (business models, customer development, agile, pivots, mvp’s) was new to everyone.

Lean 248
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No One Wins In Business Plan Competitions

Steve Blank

I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. A startup is not executing a series of knowns. A simple way to think about it is that in a startup no business plan survives first contact with customers. Business Plan Versus Business Models.

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A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1

Steve Blank

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startupcustomer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. Some of those applied as teams.

Lean 298