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. But for startups, business plans fail to match the chaotic reality they encounter in the real world.

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Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 264

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

Burn Rate 249

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 249

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

The Energy Storage division is acting like a startup, and Prescott Logan its General Manager, has lived up to the charter. He’s as good as any startup CEO in Silicon Valley. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world. You couldn’t be more wrong.

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Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 228

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyers and sellers.) This post is part four.

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Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 236

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century entrepreneurship education fell into two categories: 1) starting small businesses and 2) starting high-growth, high-risk scalable startups. But both types of entrepreneurship courses were taught using case studies and taught students how to write and execute a business plan.

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Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 435

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School since the fall of 2004 and in a joint MBA with Columbia since 2005. Back in 2004, Jerry Engel the head of the Entreprenuership program at Haas Business School at U.C. A lot has happened since I first authored and taught the class. Four Steps.

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Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 226

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.

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Lean Security Asia SBIR 394

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

This meant the class was team-based, Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering) and experiential – where the students, rather than being presented with all of the essential information, must discover that information rapidly for themselves. Take a look below.

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Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 294

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? Search Versus Execution.

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Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 322

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

The key things I want students to take from the class are: Understand that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a profitable business model. Learn how to put together a business model , not a business plan. Class Logistics. Teaching Assistants. Guest Speakers.

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Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 230

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

The Founder’s New Insight Smart founders are never satisfied with simply executing their current business model, they are constantly observing, orienting and deciding whether their current business model can be made better.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 201

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2014

Kauffman launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies. In January 2014 Part 1 of the “ Startups ” section of Founders School went online. 0:24: What is Customer Development?

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Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development Acquisition 329

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique.

Oakland 306

Oakland Asia Lean Video 306

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

But to do it, you need to actually have a sustainable business model. Starting a business is too risky. Identifying a problem doesn’t mean you’ve automatically created a business. And building a startup is not for the faint of heart. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 143

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

But to do it, you need to actually have a sustainable business model. Starting a business is too risky. Identifying a problem doesn’t mean you’ve automatically created a business. And building a startup is not for the faint of heart. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. It did not mean building a startup into a company to flip or hype on the market with no earnings or revenue, but building a company that had paying customers.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Startups and Sales If you read this post you can come away with the impression that every startup with a direct salesforce needs a consultative sales team. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? what Market Type is your startup?

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

Agile is a tremendous advance in reducing time, money and wasted product development effort – and in having products better match customer needs. But businesses are finding that Continuous Deployment not only changes engineering but has ripple effects on the rest of its business model. Lessons Learned.

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Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 330

Steve Blank

APRIL 3, 2012

We now know how to teach entrepreneurs how to think about business models and use customer development to turn hypotheses into facts. We had a couple of minutes to catch up between sessions and the conversation got strangely awkward when I asked him how their startup was going. Epiphany e·piph·a·ny noun ?/i?pif?n?/.

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Flash Customer Development Business Model Developer 315

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) Luckily most startups now realize there is a better way. Startups Are Not Small Versions of Large Companies. The revenue numbers and revenue model came from a startups original Business Plan.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 248

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

As the morning fog burns off the California coast, I am working with Steve Blank, preparing for the Lean LaunchPad Faculty Development Program we are running this August at U.C. The data from the classes seem to indicate that we’ve found have a method how to make scalable startups fail less. Serendipity.

Silicon Valley 307

Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 307

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

Knowing how to sort between vision and hallucination can avoid chaos inside your startup. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 317

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. Customer Development.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

In the end the revenue simply wasn’t enough to make a sustainable business and so we had to switch gears once more (in today’s parlance that would be a “Pivot”). We were a tiny web-conferencing startup in Pittsburgh called iMeet. I tell these stories to lay the groundwork for what I am going to call Revenue Development.

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Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

And worse, even if someone does manage to start something new, our management structure has so many financial, legal and HR hurdles that every initiative needs to match our existing business financial metrics, processes and procedures. Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 28, 2017

The goal of the class is to expose students to the basics of the Lean Methodology – Business Model Design , Customer Development and Agile Engineering. The not so good news is that other than having been customers, none of them had ever been in the fashion business. They had the Lean Startup model to follow.

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Lean Customer Development Business Model Agile 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. All the presentations are worth a watch. Team: Panacea.

Oakland 271

Oakland Lean SBIR Afghanistan 271

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Startup 2 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and we are going to offer a lower-cost, web-based version. Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 188

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? In an early-stage startup especially, revenue is not an important goal in and of itself. Don’t startups exist for the same reason? How does that stack up?

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Startup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. A VC asked me to have lunch with the CEO of a startup building cloud-based enterprise software. Ownership of Customer Validation belongs to the CEO.

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Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 272

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. When I asked him if he actually had personally left the building and talked to these potential customers, or even had gotten them on the phone, he sounded confused. But what information to collect?

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Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 240

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

VC’s invested their limited partners’ “risk capital” in a portfolio of startups in exchange for illiquid stock. Most of the startups they invested in either died by running out of money before they found a scalable business model or ended up in the “land of the living dead” by never growing (failing to Pivot.).

Venture Capital 299

Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 299

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom and test the first key hypotheses of their business model: The Value Proposition.

Cloud 232

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 232

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2010

By getting out of the building on a team project, the class helped students viscerally understand that a startup is a search for a profitable business model. Students formed teams, came up with a business idea then talked to customers, vendors and sales channel partners to validate their business model.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley Business Model Customer Development Engineer 127

www.startuplessonslearned.com

MAY 4, 2012

The following is an excerpt from HBS Professor Noam Wasserman’s new book, The Founders Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup. Noam is one of a rare breed of business academics: he studies entrepreneurship using a rigorous empirical approach. Founders Dilemmas: Equity Splits.

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Equity Founder Technical Cofounder Cofounder 72

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. After a week of hectic customer discovery , the team further refined their new business model. They believed their tools could save customers 30% of their Amazon bill. The Nine Teams Present.

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South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 223