Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

What is Customer Development. What is Customer Discovery and Why Do it? A short article on how to do Customer Discovery via Zoom. Customer Validation. The Harvard Business Review Article “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything” ties the pieces together here. What Do Customers Get from You?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

If you’ve been reading my book on Customer Development and follow my work on Market Type , this type of innovation is best for adding new products to existing markets. In fact the people a large firm needs for this kind of innovation looks suspiciously like startup founders and the processes needed look like Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

This article first appeared in Poets and Quants. Textbooks, papers, and journal articles proliferated. The reality is that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. Cases and plans are useful for teaching managers of process, not founders. Revolutions start by overturning the status quo.

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Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

Company branding builds trust and an emotional connection between businesses and potential customers. Personal branding helps founders and executives establish credibility, which is crucial for launching successful businesses, especially if they start multiple companies. Custom development. WordPress DIY.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

He would go on to be a co-founder of two mechanical engineering software companies.) Andy Wright , on October 19, 2009 at 7:25 am Said: Thanks for the insights, but I have one question — do you have any articles or blog posts that talk about what’s in “Steve’s one month MBA course for engineers.&# thanks to all.

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View from Seed

DECEMBER 8, 2015

The below article answers that question. It’s often a good idea for founders to find a way to build something and get some early market validation before raising outside capital. Is there founder/market fit? How authentic is this idea to the founder’s experience? Does the founding team have off-the-charts horsepower?

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viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

Home About Contact Me How To Make It as a First-Time Entrepreneur Vinicius Vacanti Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder September 7, 2010 | View Comments Steve Job's Technical Co-Founder “I’ve got this HUGE idea. I just need to find a technical co-founder.&# I was in this situation and we barely escaped.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2014

It’s Not A Conversion Problem, It’s A Customer Development Problem. Think About Customer Experience, Not Just Conversion Optimization. We’re going to be publishing an article on the impact testimonials has on conversions soon, so I wanted to get Hunter’s input on this specifically.

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The Next Web

MAY 4, 2013

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Stefano Bernardi, who is on the founding team of Betable , where he heads Customer Development. On top of deciding if the market is big enough, most investors only do one type of due diligence for seed deals: reference check the founders. it’s hard to check them. Join an accelerator.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. A Day in the Life of A Founder For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.

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conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses. Website Analysis.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 7, 2010

for Harvard Business Review) Im excited to have just published the first of several articles on entrepreneurship for the Harvard Business Review online. Unlike previous cross-posting Ive done for blogs, where a lot of the discussion happens here, Id like to ask you to take a minute and click through to read the full article.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So what does CTO mean, besides just "technical founder who really cant manage anyone?" Great article youre now in my rss feeds :) October 2, 2008 4:37 AM kamilski81 said. While reading this article Ive been thinking about my role as "CTO". Hi Eric, Great article - Ive added you to my regular RSS reads. Great article!

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Steve Blank

MARCH 13, 2018

Co-founder magazine just interviewed me about the current state of entrepreneurship – in startups and large companies – and how we got here. click here to read the rest of the article. I thought they did a good job of capturing my thoughts. Take a read here.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. Ive linked to your article from mine.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

steve Mark , on July 27, 2009 at 11:46 am Said: Thanks for the article Steve. I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. I recently completed the Validation step (less the industry analyst presentations) and am ready to move on to Customer Creation. You haven’t missed a thing.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

It should be even more important to the founders themselves, because it demonstrates that their business hypothesis is grounded in reality. These founders have not managed, to borrow a phrase from Steve Blank , to create a scalable and repeatable sales process. Get product into customers’ hands. More on that in a moment.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

On the surface, it might seem difficult to quantify the value of good design – however, as per your article, I don’t see any reason why contracts with designers wouldn’t be structured in such a way that target conversion rates, bounce rates, and other metrics would drive the compensation level.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Thanks for writing this article.

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ConversionXL

MARCH 28, 2014

With over 100 years of movie & video history embedded in our collective subconscious, your customer’s expectations are really high. To get more detail on the 12 most common styles of explainer videos, check out this article on TheStartupVideos.com. What Is An Explainer Video? Step 2 – Nail The Script .

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Previously she was Co-Founder and CEO of SNAZZ, a cloud-based event management platform. What are some of the unique benefits and constraints from the point of view of a founder? . Access to the corporate investor’s ecosystem can open up great opportunities from technology validation to customer and partner development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, September 10, 2008 A new version of the Joel Test (draft) (This article is a draft - your comments are especially welcome as I think through these issues. I am an avid reader of Joel, and your article here is a great addition to his already brilliant check-list. Please leave feedback!)

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2018

Much of the writing on startups focuses on two elements: finding product-market fit scaling the company once #1 is accomplished For product-market fit, we have a lot of source material to work with from the last decade: Steve Blank’s leadership on Customer Development , and Eric Ries’ on the Lean Startup ?—?along More on BP3 at www.bp-3.com.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

All of the incentives described in the article focus on making it easy and highly desirable to launch your product: [He] claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Googles internal ecosystem tends towards, and its because they pump so much energy into pointing people in that direction. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

Andy Mathieson, a founder and managing member at Fairview Capital , was particularly supportive. Third, the company expected hundreds of amateurs who performed poorly in the game to realize they weren’t good at investing and therefore become customers. in fact only five people converted into paying customers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, August 8, 2009 Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and whats changed since then) My recent article on technical debt and its positive uses generated a fair bit of controversy. 1] For more on SBCE, see this MIT Sloan Management Review article. So, in that spirit: thanks, Mitch.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

The core of the article is my first attempt to articulate the key metrics (in graph form) that I believe demonstrate customer value. When startups ask me what to measure, I always come back to these three as a starting point: Revenue per customer. You can read the article to find out why. Thanks for the article.

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Feld Thoughts

DECEMBER 4, 2012

This article ( Business Plans Are An Historical Artifact ) first appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal The Accelerators Column , which I’m contributing to on a regular basis. . Related articles. The textbook for the course was Jeffry A. Is Your Business Plan Covered in Cobwebs? Looking for Help?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Eric, Great article - provides context and vocabulary for dialog on a very interesting tension in startups. Excellent article. I think that if a web founder would come to me asking for an investment talking about how he's coding an immensly scalable, perfectly designed system, I will throw him out in an instant.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

What led you to become a subscriber, versus just reading an article and leaving like everybody else? (or, Labels: listening to customers 19comments: Ben said. In order to convince me, Id to see another link to an article here somewhere that I enjoyed. Read some articles, liked what I saw. How did you hear about it?

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

Signal is a fundraising tool for founders run by NFX Guild, which identifies the most relevant VCs for you. . HOF Capital is currently developing a proprietary sourcing tool to automatically filter for potential deal prospects that fit our criteria. Pitchbot.vc is an AI bot which helps companies refine their sales pitch to VCs.

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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Our LivePlan customers are entrepreneurs, our founder and staff have run and sold companies, the Bplans readers are aspiring entrepreneurs (or actual entrepreneurs), and as I sell my own handmade jewelry, I like to think I have a very small claim to the title. At Palo Alto Software, I am surrounded by entrepreneurs.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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