Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. What metrics do we use to see if we learned enough in Customer Discovery ?

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

We’re deep into teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The class has talked to 1,440 customers to date.). We’ve recorded these panels for each part of the business model canvas.

Lean 258

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 258

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

So what’s wrong the product development model? The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.)

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

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.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

Today the National Institutes of Health announced they are offering my Lean LaunchPad class ( I-Corps @ NIH ) to commercialize Life Science. 110 researchers and clinicians, and Principal Investigators got out of the lab and hospital, and talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them.

Lean 269

Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 269

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

The University of Maryland is now integrating the Lean LaunchPad ® into standard innovation and entrepreneurship courses across all 12 colleges within the University. Over 44 classes have embedded the business model canvas and/or Customer Discovery including a year-long course taken by every single one of its bioengineering majors.

Maryland 272

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 272

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

Now at Imperial College Business School and Co-Founder of the Wicked Acceleration Labs , Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking.

Lean 294

Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 294

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

While the Lean LaunchPad class has been adopted by Universities and the National Science Foundation , the question we get is, “Can students in K-12 handle an experiential entrepreneurship class?” They both attended our latest Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. I framed the search for a viable business model as the focus.

Lean 309

Lean Cleveland Ohio Business Model 309

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

Over the weekend I got asked the best way to teach students the principles of Lean via Zoom. I realized that pre-pandemic I had put together a series of two-minute videos called “See Why.” Here’s what I suggested they offer their students: Lean in Context. No Business Plan Survives First Contact With Customers.

Lean 356

Lean Customer Development Business Model Video 356

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

I’m going to take that thought out into the field and validate it with my customers." I’ve spoken to dozens of customers, I have a validated customer persona, built an MVP to test key behavioral hypotheses, and the data doesn’t back what you’re saying." Customer Validation 101. Either: "That’s interesting.

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

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. Today, we’ve come full circle as Lean goes mainstream.

Technical Review 327

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 327

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The Lean LaunchPad Class. You may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. 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

JUNE 26, 2015

—– Lean Innovation Management. 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. The result will be: a new, Lean version of the Three Horizons of Innovation. Here’s how.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

The most common mistake startups make is assuming they can operate the same way big companies do, and expect success with little to no feedback from potential customers. A corporation like Starbucks could pick locations by throwing a dart at a map and know they’ll at least break even with a new location and mediocre customer service.

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 28, 2013

While the Lean LaunchPad class has been adopted by Universities and the National Science Foundation , the question we get is, “Can students in K-12 handle an experiential entrepreneurship class?” They both attended our latest Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. I framed the search for a viable business model as the focus.

Lean 201

Lean Cleveland Ohio Business Model 201

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. Customer Discovery. He worked hard to deeply understand the customer problems of these two customer segments.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

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. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders. Wireframes.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum. We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

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. Today, we’ve come full circle as Lean goes mainstream.

Technical Review 219

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 219

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. 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. The First Class.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Science and Industrial Policy Venture Capital'

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

Surprisingly if you’ve filled out the business model canvas you already know who you need. I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. Filed under: Customer Development. Customer Development'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

We’re going to test this hypothesis by teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. used to serve those customers. Another team reordered their device’s feature set based on customer needs.

SBIR 314

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 314

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. Lessons Learned.

Customer 436

Customer Marketing Customer Development Lean 436

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups. Waterfall Development.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning™. Before I dive too deeply into the Lean Planning methodology, it makes sense to talk about its history and where it comes from. It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go” instead of detailed, formal business plans.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 6, 2014

The concepts in my Lean LaunchPad curriculum can be taught in a variety of classes–as an introduction to entrepreneurship all the way to a graduate level “ capstone class.”. Our Lean LaunchPad class requires student teams to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week while they’re building the product.

Lean 278

Lean Customer Development Business Model Email 278

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.).

Lean 385

Lean Security Asia SBIR 385

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2014

—— The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. 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. Alexander Osterwalder wrote it.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

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

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.) talk to more customers?

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Try innovating inside a large company where 99% of the company is executing the current business model, while you’re trying to figure out and build what comes next. And they also recognize that simply exploiting their existing assets, capabilities, and business models is insufficient for long-term survival.

Incubator 402

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

With hindsight we should have had “proof of concepts” tested in a corporate center (think ‘pop-up incubator’) where they would do extensive Customer Discovery. We should had done this before assigning the teams to a particular business unit (or had the ability to create a new business unit, or spin the team out of the company).

Programming 265

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 265

Steve Blank

JANUARY 2, 2014

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. Then reality hit.

Lean 240

Lean Algorithm Customer Development IP 240

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. The most common mistake startups make is assuming they can operate the same way big companies do, and expect success with little to no feedback from potential customers. This is a customer development problem. Website Analysis.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. We’ve been reading your blog about your Lean Launchpad class.” We want to make a bet that your Lean Launchpad class can apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification.

Incubator 301

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 301

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21 st 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. Problem – Lean Doesn’t Have a Market Definition Step.

Customer 420

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420