Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit."

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Once upon a time every great organization was a scrappy startup willing to take risks – new ideas, new methods, new customers, targets, and mission. If they were a commercial company, they figured out product/market fit; or if a government organization, it focused on solution/mission fit. Process Versus Product.

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Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 319

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Teams talk to 10-15 customers a week and make a minimum of 100 customer visits.

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Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 286

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. Maximum Viable Product.

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Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

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.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

While most of the early attention in a startup is paid to finding product market fit ( the match between value proposition and customer segment on the right-side of the canvas) it’s the left side of the canvas that will tell you what your founding team should look like. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development. Here’s how.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling.

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Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 322

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

The company loses customers, then revenues and profits decline and it eventually gets acquired or goes out of business. He believed that large companies handle sustaining innovation – evolutionary changes in their markets, products, etc. valued by their existing customers – fairly well. Creative Destruction.

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Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 248

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2020

Revenue models and forecasts are no longer valid. While there’s agreement that companies need to adapt to changing markets, rapidly find new markets, new customers and new revenue models, the question is how ? Companies in cosmetics and perfume production pivoted their production lines as well. Here’s how.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us?

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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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that. Lets see why.

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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. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

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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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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world.

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

And to today, when its major product is simply innovation. When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. Here’s what the product development diagram looks like from a sales perspective.

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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

JANUARY 6, 2014

For the last 75 years products (both durable goods and software) were built via Waterfall development. This process forced companies to release and launch products by model years, and market new and “improved” versions. And these changes may have unintended consequences leading to customer dissatisfaction and confusion.

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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. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 217

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. What’s going on?

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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? finding product/market fit).

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

But, in fact, they can be crucial in large, established companies that need to find growth in new products and new markets. that discretely address specific areas of the production chain. When teams are organized that way they’re so much more productive, so much more energized, the creativity you unlock is incredible.

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Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2013

We figured our key partners would include consumers (to contribute data much like Wikipedia’s users), manufacturers (to keep their product information updated) and the US government (to supply datasets to power our content). Regarding revenue, we made a big bet on “purchase intent.” Lean Start-up Connection: Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

The other departments in marketing gave the same answers; the product-marketing department said their job was to write data sheets. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.”

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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. Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

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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. existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups. StageGate Process.

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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. As a founder you start out with: 1) a vision of a product with a set of features, 2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users?

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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. The interesting part is when you get a couple months into your product cycle.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) In fact, for decades if you drew this diagram on day one of a startup VC’s would nod sagely and everyone would get to work heading to first customer ship. The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering.

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Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 329

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) Others emphasize how to build a product. Therefore we developed a class to teach students how to think about all the parts of building a business, not just the product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. SEM is a simple idea.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, November 17, 2008 The four kinds of work, and how to get them done: part one Ive written before about some of the advantages startups have when they are very small, like the benefits of having a pathetically small number of customers. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

This also literally can’t catch every problem, because your test sandboxes or test clusters will never be exactly like the production system. But I will tell you not to have too little or too much, because those definitely ruin the food or product. Heck, thats what it says right there in the agile manifesto. But it worked.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The business plan is a wonderful document for organizing and planning for existing companies to launch follow-on products. This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination. Business Plan vs. Business Model + Customer Development.

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