Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Business Model Design. Today every business organization from startup to large company uses the words “business model.” More importantly they showed how any company’s business model could be defined in 9 boxes.

Customer Development 329

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 329

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

Our goal– to inspire, educate and empower hundred’s of thousands of entrepreneurs and help create 10,000 startups. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

In my 21 years as an entrepreneur, I would come up for air once a month to religiously read the Harvard Business Review. It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me a view of the management issues my customers were dealing with. ” Groucho Marx.

Technical Review 327

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

. — Teaching students to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. We wanted to teach our students how to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. The startups and the teaching team crafted a challenge for the kids to tackle using the Customer Development methodology, Lean Launchpad tools and the business model canvas.

Lean 334

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 334

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Most entrepreneurs today don’t remember the Dot-Com bubble of 1995 or the Dot-Com crash that followed in 2000. First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit). It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup. And it may work. Dot Com Boom to Bust.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Part 1: Bend, Oregon Ecosystem and Entrepreneurs. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. Few entrepreneurs find this scalable and repeatable business model because it’s not easy. Here’s Part 2 of Dino’s story….

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

In my 21 years as an entrepreneur, I would come up for air once a month to religiously read the Harvard Business Review. It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me a view of the management issues my customers were dealing with. ” Groucho Marx.

Technical Review 219

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 219

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

Vision Synching in a Lean Startup The Fallacy of Customer Development Entrepreneurs, Lower Investors’ Risk by Validating your Start-up Company’s Business Proposition Lessons Learned: What is customer development? billion dollar mistake. billion dollar mistake.

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

While it sounds simple , the Build Measure Learn approach to product development is a radical improvement over the traditional Waterfall model used throughout the 20 th century to build and ship products. Only after shipping and attempting to sell the product would a startup hear any substantive feedback from customers.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). And going for crowdfunding before you do customer discovery with customers can lock you into the wrong idea too early. Tiffani Bell.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Alexander Osterwalder and I spent last week in Salt Lake City, Utah as judges at the 2 nd Annual International Business Model Competition , hosted by Professor Nathan Furr , and his team at the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. The Business Plan ? The Business Plan ?- a roadmap for execution.

Business Model 263

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 263

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Get Out of the Building and test the Business Model. This post is part one. to get hard-earned information.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

But to do it, you need to actually have a sustainable business model. I don’t recommend anyone become an entrepreneur. Starting a business is too risky. The tools and temperament needed to get from startup idea to startup success were the focus of the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show.

Cofounder 142

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 142

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

I remember thinking, “Wow, whoever’s on the other end of phone sounds just like an entrepreneur, they were asking for the impossible.” We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Some incubators would have labeled this group too old to be entrepreneurs.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

At best I think business plan competitions are a waste of time. Business Plan Versus Business Models. Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from? A simple way to think about it is that in a startup no business plan survives first contact with customers. What did you build/do?

Business Plan 312

Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 312

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. What I found in Finland was: a whole lot of smart, passionate entrepreneurs who want to build a startup hub in Helsinki.

Finland 324

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 324

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

But to do it, you need to actually have a sustainable business model. I don’t recommend anyone become an entrepreneur. Starting a business is too risky. The tools and temperament needed to get from startup idea to startup success were the focus of the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

As I looked around at other schools, I saw pretty much the same landscape – business plan classes, business plan competitions and loosely coupled accelerators that focused primarily on mentoring. There had been tectonic shifts in the startup world, but our business school curriculum had barely moved. And there it was.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

I presented to 1,000’s of entrepreneurs, talked to 17 startups, gave 12 lectures, had 9 interviews, chatted with 8 VC’s, sat on 4 panels, talked policy with 2 government ministers, 2 members of parliament, 1 head of a public pension fund and was in 1 TV-documentary. Thanks to Kristo Ovaska and team for the fabulous logistics!)

Finland 324

Finland Naming Russia Government 324

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

Why, then, are so many founders so reluctant to invest even 500 or 1,000 hours upfront to be sure that, when they’re done, the business they’re building will face genuine, substantial demand or enthusiasm. Without passionate customers, even the most passionate entrepreneur will flounder at best. Dropbox is a great example.

Startup 332

Startup Cofounder Customer Development Viral 332

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2020

The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Suppliers are going out of business or requiring cash-up-front terms. Here’s how.

Customer 436

Customer Marketing Customer Development Lean 436

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. However in practice most companies treated the Three Horizons like they are simply incremental execution of the same business model.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What we found is that during the class almost all of them pivoted - making substantive changes to one or more of their business model canvas components. In the real world a big pivot in life sciences far down the road of development is a very bad sign due to huge sunk costs. identify financing vehicles before you need them.

SBIR 314

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 314

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of this century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models, while startups search for scalable business models. This new framework can act as the front-end of Customer Development.

Lean 333

Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

They start with an innovation, search for a repeatable business model, build the infrastructure for a company, then grow by efficiently executing the model. outpace an existing company’s business model. You want to start executing the business model. Companies have a fairly predictable life cycle.

Search 242

Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 242

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2011

I wrote about entrepreneurs as artists in a previous post. Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Family/Career. If you can’t see the video click here.

Entrepreneur 313

Entrepreneur Business Model Customer Development Business Plan 313

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 9, 2012

Today, however there are two important updates for entrepreneurs everywhere. Two years in the making and literally ten years in development, I’m proud to announce that my new book, The Startup Owners Manual , goes onto the printing press next Tuesday. Startups search for business models, exisitng companies execute them.

Entrepreneur 289

Entrepreneur Lean Business Model Customer Development 289

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

The bootcamp requested that participants do what entrepreneurs do before requesting seed funding – Discover, Network and Accelerate. (In Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching.

Programming 291

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 291

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 6, 2012

They will be relegated to creating better mousetraps or cloning other countries’ business models. Entrepreneurs as Dissidents. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he ran the Think Different ads, a brilliant marketing campaign to make Apple’s core customers believe that Apple was still fighting for the brand.

Entrepreneur 335

Entrepreneur United States Customer Development Business Model 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

The bootcamp requested that participants do what entrepreneurs do before requesting seed funding – Discover, Network and Accelerate. (In Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching.

Programming 283

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 283

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.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

business models. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Almost every entrepreneur I met was using VPN to circumvent the Great Firewall. There’s a noticeable lack of tenacity in young, new entrepreneurs.

China 323

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2020

We’re holding a series of 5-day online classes at Stanford where teams will learn how to develop new business models for an economy that’s getting back to work and on the road to recovery. The Covid-19 virus has upended traditional ways of doing business, travel, education, entertainment, healthcare, etc.

Lean 436

Lean Business Model Affiliate Incubator 436

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262