Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2010

In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. But the VC’s kept coming back to the lack of adoption of the product, the floundering sales force, the burn rate – and “the plan.&#. They don’t.

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Revenue Balance Sheet Hockey Stick Burn Rate 230

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

In fact, they were screaming at them to dramatically reduce their burn rates. Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. Angel investment, which was small to start with, disappeared, and most corporate VCs shut down.

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Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

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. 3] I mean organisational scale rather than technical scale — hiring, funding, advertising, etc. 2] Data via the startup genome project. [3]

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Burn Rate PR Campaign Hiring 35

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We can’t bring customers to this rundown building. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. Reply Jerry Ji , on May 15, 2009 at 4:56 pm Said: When my startup starts hiring, I’ll make “The Four Steps to the Epiphany&# a prerequisite reading for every interviewer.

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Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. In ten years, from the early 1950′s to the early 1960′s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000. to do that.

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Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

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). Combining agile development with customer developm.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Do your customers really read TechCrunch?

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Hire the absolute best and the brightest, true experts in their fields, who in turn can hire the smartest people possible to staff their departments. Here are a few: We know what customers want. But that was two full years before any customers were allowed to use it. Stealth is a customer-free zone.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150