Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit). Startups with huge burn rates – building leases, staff, PR and advertising – ran out of money. Lean makes sense when capital is scarce and when you need to keep burn rates low.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Do your customers really read TechCrunch? Do some Customer Development instead. Spend your time with renewable sources of customers and iterate.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. Worse was the large staff in departments appropriate to a mainstream-scale product, especially in customer service and QA. The passionate early adopters who flocked to the product at its launch could not sustain this outsized burn rate.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). Were talking PayPal -sized variations.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

The Startup Toolkit

JUNE 27, 2012

Similarly, I think that working nights & weekends is an awesome way to start doing customer development and answering the big questions about your business. That’s because, historically, the default mistake was to do the opposite & over-commit too soon.

Burn Rate 35

Burn Rate PR Campaign Hiring 35