Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 228

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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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

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. The Old Days – Waterfall Product Development. Waterfall – The Customer View.

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Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 330

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

Hearpreneur

SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

Tesla has always put a huge emphasis on product development and technological advancement. They dedicate themselves to constant innovation in not only the technology and products that they offer to the public, but as a corporate entity as well. Thanks to Christina Giaquinto, Modular Closets ! #4- 10- Mindbody. 11- Microsoft.

Technical Review 122

Technical Review Entrepreneur Software Review SEO 122

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 5, 2010

When we demand overwhelming customer outcry before committing to the slightest product change, we're in danger of losing the value of creating a cool feature that takes too much effort but people just love. Still, every article I read turns the creative process of business and product design into Vulcanian objectivity.

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Software Review Metrics Lean Algorithm 226

Hearpreneur

JANUARY 26, 2022

You're likely going to be experiencing revenues in waves, owing to the pandemic booms and dips, and the varying regulations. Prezi hired the former director of product from Pixar to build a more cinematic video meeting experience. Think of the agility that comes with CAI, etc. Companies will also be able to simplify product.

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Software Review Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Entrepreneur 121

ConversionXL

MAY 1, 2017

One of the greatest threats to long-term success is when companies aren’t vigilant enough about responding to the changes in their market—whether it’s by failing to spot product or channel fatigue, acknowledge new competition, make needed updates to products or marketing adjustments in a timely fashion, or embrace new technology coming online.

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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. Every large company, whether it can articulate it or not, is executing a proven business model (s).

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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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ConversionXL

OCTOBER 7, 2021

The classic lifespan of successful products is a story in four parts: Introduction Growth Maturity Decline. How this story plays out has a lot to do with the type of product and how it’s improved over time, if at all. In this article, we’ll look at the different stages of the product lifecycle through the lens of marketing.

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Product Marketing Software Review Social Media 142

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. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." Whats wrong with this picture?

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

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San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If you dont have customers, a product, investors, or a board of directors, you can pretty much stay focused on just one thing at a time. Strategy - startups first encounter this when they have the beginnings of a product, and theyve achieved some amount of product/market fit. Expo SF (May.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And when we do make bets, they’re small bets on incremental products or acquisitions that simply add to the bottom line.”. More agile competitors are starting to eat into our business. Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. and how to price the product.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

The site visits include stops at Square (the payments startup founded by Twitter co-creator Jack Dorsey), WeWork Soma (an amazing co-working space) and Pivotal Labs (leaders in Lean and Agile consulting), along with one more super-interesting location we’ll announce shortly. Thus we reduce the risk of deployments.

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Continuous Deployment Norway Lean Analytics 162

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

Most customers of most products hate new releases. Thats a perfectly reasonable reaction, given that most releases of most products are bad news. Even worse, the sad state of product development generally means that the new "features" are as likely to be ones that make the product worse, not better.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Two Ways to Hold Entrepreneurs Accountable - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review Way back when the money was doled out, the team made a compelling pitch about the large market that was going to adopt their new innovative product or service. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised.

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Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 10, 2018

Something powerful is shaking up the Manufacturing industry and it will change the way we work and produce products forever. To achieve this, present technological innovations need to be explored, developed, and adapted into every step of the production process. by Donald Chan, founder of IMPACT! Brand Communications.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

At IMVU, we were terrified by how early we shipped (and charged for) our first product. We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. My 2008 revenues were over $100k on a 35k inventory. Retention cohort analysis.

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San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2017

With agile development cycles and uncertain monetization models, they live and die by data and experimentation. More and more, people are using experimentation as a way to optimise not just sales – but also pricing, functionality, and product. Image Source. And that expands the skills that optimisers need. How do you do that?

Conversion 48

Conversion Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Analytics 48

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption. Notice that the traditional product introduction model leads to a product launch and the execution of a revenue plan. Albert Einstein.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 248

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Once the product begins to ship, startup sales execs use orders and revenue as its marker of progress in understanding customers. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If all the engineers work on the same thing at the same time, and all the marketers do the same, and QA, and ops, all the way down the line, then each department develops its own team-based private reality. Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company. Now picture product prioritization meetings in such a company.

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Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And once you have a relationship with an author, musician, or journalist, it will be quite easy for them to offer new products and services – and for you to give them feedback that helps them shape ever more interesting (and ever more profitable) offerings. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. We’re building the wrong product!” And the rule was we weren’t changing anything about the product architecture until Ben and I agreed.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 317

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

This condition makes it much easier for teams to innovate, experiment, and achieve sustained productivity. One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&# One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production. Continuous deployment also acts as a speed regulator.

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Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Sometimes an early negative result from an experiment is a harbinger of doom for that product, and means it should be abandoned. Imagine a general manager that has read The Innovator’s Dilemma and related books, and is therefore trying hard to help her organization make a transition to a new product category via disruptive innovation.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

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.)

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Forecast Agile Revenue Founder 265

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. We bought Steve’s book , started product development and began reaching out to customers ins search of our first earlyvangelists. This meant we had a hard time focusing our development. Focus on revenue from day one.

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Customer Development Developer Customer California 230

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 29, 2020

Wikipedia.com defines a “startup company (startup or startup) is an entrepreneurial venture which is typically a newly emerged, fast-growing business that aims to meet a marketplace need by developing a viable business model around an innovative product, service, process, or a platform.”. Invest in your brand. Final thoughts.

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Bootstrapping Global Startup Hungary 85

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.

Customer Development 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

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

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. I believe all this advice is wrong. It’s akin to putting lipstick on a pig.

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating. You take your product vision and get out of your building to turn your hypothesis into facts. How does product development differ in communications hardware versus enterprise software, etc.

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ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 5, 2019

Customer personas are often talked about in marketing and product design, but they’re almost never done well. You use them to make better marketing, product, and business decisions and to keep your customer top-of-mind when doing so. This post contains video, click to play]. They all mean the same thing, though.

Software Review 115

Software Review Design Agile Analytics 115

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Not just about expenses, about increasing revenue. Make sure for planned revenues you have "leading indicators" to know if you will hit it. This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. And its hard to know if youre truly succeeding without a focus on revenue.

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121