Hearpreneur

OCTOBER 25, 2023

While platforms like Instagram offer a great starting point, the key to differentiation lies in the age-old strategy of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). And that can make or break your customer retention, especially in the early stages. And yet, it’s surprising how hesitant small businesses are to engage in loyalty programs.

eCommerce 133

eCommerce Omaha Entrepreneur SEO 133

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 16, 2018

Companies are embarking on digital transformation journeys to experiment new digital ways of doing business — this means leveraging data smarter to enable unprecedented levels of efficiency, agility, and productivity. Fact: the world’s first mobile phone call was made on April 3, 1973, by Martin Cooper, a senior engineer at Motorola.

SMS 164

SMS Japan Asia China 164

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management. George Bernard Shaw.

Agile 332

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 27, 2011

There are very few people in Silicon Valley who have such a precise grasp on what defines success of early-stage startup companies than Eric Ries. 42:20 Did agile development influence you? 46:50 Engines of Growth. And there are very few people who so consistently exceed my expectations when I hear them speak.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley Lean Social Media PR 301

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

GE’s performance in implementing Customer Development gives lie to the tale that only web startups can be agile. And they’ve being doing this while driving product cost down and performance up. Corporate elephants can dance. So why this post? They will build the sales team that follows.

Silicon Valley 222

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 222

VC Cafe

AUGUST 2, 2022

As an early stage investor in the world of gaming and metaverse technology at Remagine Ventures, I find these companies have the potential to set the agenda, become the potential platforms for developers building in this space and future acquirers/consolidators of startups building the next generation of the Internet.

IP 206

IP Cofounder Valuation Acquisition 206

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, science and engineering at both Stanford and U.C. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. Seeing Is Believing.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Both Sides of the Table

MAY 27, 2013

Growth like this, this early in a company’s lifecycle rarely happens. In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. You may know how much to pay in cash or equity for your new VP Engineering.

Advisory Board 365

Advisory Board CTO Hire Fractional CTO Los Angeles 365

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. Two-thirds of the interested students were from the engineering school; the other third were from the business school. This post is part one.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. That’s why startups are agile.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

The first time a few brave corporate innovators tried to overlay the Lean tools and techniques that work in early-stage startups in an existing corporation, the result was chaos, confusion, frustration and ultimately, failure. Lean is The Engine for the Ambidextrous Organization. Fast forward to today.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

The companies I spoke to all agreed that the community there was extremely supportive, especially in the critical ulta-early-stage. Then, create an encouraging environment for early-stage companies. Provide early seed capital, and be the ones to make those introductions. And do your customer development.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Silicon Valley Startup Continuous Deployment 113

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Let’s start with a simple question: why do early-stage startups want revenue? This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. Go on an agile diet quickly. But all things are never equal. Great post!

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Another advantage of the early stages is that most dont have to juggle too many competing priorities. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) Their engineers hated us. Engineers as Salesmen I thought (and still do) that this sales guy walked on water.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. The goal is for them is to observe this class, then host and teach the next round of 50 NSF Innovation Corps scientist/engineer teams in July. Here are the first five. It Feels Like 20 Years Ago Today. And do it in 8 weeks.

Lean 256

Lean Business Model Agile United States 256

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. Why don’t we have standards for what metrics VC’s want to see from their early stage startup teams?

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 290

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 30, 2009

A discounted price is available for early stage entrepreneurs and students. In 2002 I became exposed to the idea of “agile software development&# and subsequently was a first round investor in Rally Software which is now the market leader in Agile application lifecycle management software. Expo SF (May.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

I got to spend time inside his company while I was using their software to analyze early-stage ventures. 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.

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. Why don’t we have standards for what metrics VC’s want to see from their early stage startup teams?

Silicon Valley 258

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 258

Altgate

SEPTEMBER 16, 2010

The presentation was on outsourcing generally, not just software engineering and the audience was very early stage companies (some yet to be founded). Now, for very early stage companies, you may be thinking, “I don’t have any cash, so outsourcing isn’t an option.&# Engineering/QA.

Software Review 65

Software Review Offshore Startup Boston 65

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 14, 2008

Later, when the company was much larger, we had everyone on our engineering team agree to sit in on one usability test every month. It wasnt a huge time commitment, but it meant that every engineer was getting regular contact with an actual customer, which was invaluable. They just dont need another authority figure in their life.

San Francisco 131

San Francisco Customer Lean Continuous Deployment 131

Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s. Yet even with all these tools, early stage startups still need to physically meet with advisors and investors. Victor Hugo.

Silicon Valley 281

Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 281

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

I thought a good place to start was with the origins of the idea that "software design" should be considered a discipline in its own right, on par with computer science, software engineering, and computer programming. Great engineers see it and smile. This is called set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE). [1]

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” This was a very large and established tech company; its engineering organization developed the core day-to-day capabilities of the organization. Engineering continually felt overwhelmed.

Incubator 312

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 312

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 9, 2009

In fact, early stage companies shouldnt be able to get time from anyone else - who else would be crazy enough to try an truly innovative new product? christinelu : if youre building a disruptive innovation.the only people who you want to talk to are early adopters. Brilliant insight. Expo SF (May.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Japan Continuous Deployment 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Telecom O2 learning to move at the speed of the internet 500 Startups and their accelerated feedback loops on what works, and what doesn't work in early-stage investing. 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.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. One way to conceive of our goal in an early-stage venture is to incrementally “fill in the blanks&# for the business model that we think will one day power our startup. The solution is to change our focus from outputs to inputs.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

Unfortunately, they are disinterested in doing the hard work to help early stage entrepreneurs and companies. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

SoCal CTO

APRIL 28, 2014

I’m a long way into development and I’m 90% done and we are having issues getting it completed Developers like to over engineer. Developers like to over engineer. Generally I say that developers should be doing significant developer level testing, but in early-stage startups, testing falls back on the founders.

Technical Cofounder 280

Technical Cofounder Developer Fractional CTO CTO Hire 280

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the startup, it's time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. Board meetings that guide startups haven't changed since the early 1900's. Why don't we have standards for what metrics VCs want to see from their early stage startup teams?

Silicon Valley 117

Silicon Valley Balance Sheet Metrics Early Stage 117

Eric Friedman

JUNE 11, 2019

A strong bluff if you have no backup, but a reasonable move if you have a team and want to move onto the next company/prospect/project as a small agile team. Signing Bonus – Interestingly, many early stage teams can answer the question “would you pay an extra $10K to the recruiter if they could get an engineer tomorrow?”

Term Sheet 68

Term Sheet Stock Options Early Stage Agile 68

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

This is important, especially if you are a very early stage company. Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Six streaming locations Interviews ► March (7) New conference website, speakers, agenda Two new scholarship programs for lean startups Speed up or slow down? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 13, 2015

Ultimately, [our initial strategy] would have been a disaster,” said REDACTED, the team’s engineering leader. “We When you’re in those early stages of launching a product the world has never seen, REDACTED explained, all that matters is feedback. We would have had this great new product with all this development effort and.

Security 60

Security Customer Early Stage Agile 60

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2013

And the urgency stems not from an agile competitor, a first-mover market, or a power-law distribution of reward, but rather from the need to achieve enough velocity to overcome the tremendous gravitational pull of business-as-usual. In my case, the scarce resources, rather than time and money, are time and political capital.

Lean 162

Lean Startup Ratchet New York City 162

Seeing Both Sides

NOVEMBER 7, 2012

The art and science of product management has changed radically in the years since, with agile and lean methodologies replacing the more centralized, older methods. We interviewed dozens of product managers from the Valley, NY and Boston and debated the different ways product managers impact the business and drive operations.

Management 34

Management Product Agile IPO 34

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

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. is no right or wrong in the early days of startup. A few successful ones do all these things. Thank you, Steve.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242