Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

To fill this gap I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany , a book about the Customer Development process and how it changes the way startups are built. My new book, The Startup Owners Manual , outlined the steps of building a startup or new division inside a company in far greater detail.

Technical Review 219

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 219

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Ben Horowitz ’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things is driving the conversation around startup management this year. Bob Sutton is a Stanford professor and the author of several best-selling books on standout management, including Scaling Up Excellence , an investigation of high-growth companies. Eric Ries will interview him.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. This engineering manager is a smart guy, and very experienced.

Software Review 164

Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Their book Lead and Disrupt describes how others can learn how to do so. This book not only explains the “why does this happen” but more importantly gives you the tools for “what to do about it.”. In this book O’Reilly and Tushman succinctly articulate why these tools succeed in start-ups but fail in large companies.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

Over the last 50 years engineers have moved from building computers out of individual transistors to building with prepackaged logic gates. It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Their book “ Business Model Generation ,” is the definitive text on the subject. (And x86 , ARM.)

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Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 329

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. She posted her notes from the talk here.)

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Customer Development Business Model Developer Design 270

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. Key ideas from the book include the following: 1. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Whether they’re using a formal process to search for a business model like Customer Development or just trial and error, startup founders are intuitively goal-seeking to optimize their business model. The Customer Development model that I write and teach about is the entrepreneur’s version of Boyds’ OODA loop.).

Business Model 332

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 332

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. The plan calls for selling in volume the day Engineering is finished building the product.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. 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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

JULY 24, 2012

Brent Frei, the Onyx CEO walks in and he looked about 6’ 8’ and something told me he could tear telephone books in half. I left with enough code so our engineers could get started immediately. Onyx gave us an engineering contact and he helped our team make sense of their system. But I didn’t realize that at the time.

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Seattle Cofounder Engineer Sales 259

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. 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.)

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

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. The same is true in your company.

Silicon Valley 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2014

Product/Market fit now has its own book. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses and agile engineering to build minimum viable products. His new book does three things: 1. Product/Market fit now has its own book.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, no entrepreneurship departments in universities, etc. Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

I just spent a few weeks in Japan and China on a book tour for the Japanese and Chinese versions of the Startup Owners Manual. Though they’re familiar with technology in the valley, I picked up some important cultural difference from students and startup engineers I talked to. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

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. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

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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Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

It ultimately failed because she was focused on engineering the product, but didn’t validate the rest of her business model (product/market fit, distribution channel, customer acquisition, etc.). There was nothing special about it; you could just book appointments on it.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

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? All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.

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Customer Business Model Restful Video 413

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. I also knew our customers. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. As part of the sales organization, I thought I kind of figured out what the function of the sales department was. (In

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

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.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier. customer development. agile engineering. Some general customer development slides click here. Free: Startup Tools.

Open Source 335

Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

OnlyOnce

AUGUST 12, 2013

Book Short: Is CX the new UX? Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business , by Harley Manning and Kelly Bodine from Forrester Research, was a good read that kept crossing back and forth between good on the subject at hand, and good business advice in general. It has a beginning but it doesn’t have an end.”

Lean 94

Lean Agile B2B Metrics 94

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Outside of Andela, Jeremy serves on the board of the Young Entrepreneur Council and the education non-profit PENCIL and co-authored a book Education & Skills 2.0:

Cofounder 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

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.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

I read a ton of existing literature and came up with a formal methodology for search I called Customer Development. I wrote a book about this called the Four Steps to the Epiphany. Berkeley asked me to teach a class in Customer Development at Haas business school. Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Teaching'

Lean 286

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 286

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

My first book The Four Steps to Epiphany was a pale shadow of his work, but it did the job. Customer Development became one of the three parts of the Lean Startup as Eric Ries and Alexander Osterwalder provided the other two components (Agile Engineering and the business model canvas.) How to Measure your Life.

Lean 428

Lean Business Model Government Agile 428

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Objects in Our Mirror are Larger than they Appear Our first goal was to set up benchmarks to measure the performance of our own graphics boards on the real applications our customers used (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker.) Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Outside of Andela, Jeremy serves on the board of the Young Entrepreneur Council and the education non-profit PENCIL and co-authored a book Education & Skills 2.0:

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120