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. Here’s their description of why and how.

Customer 424

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 21, 2017

Rather, buyer behavior is rooted in their strategy — a combination of product thesis, their theory of their market’s evolution, how they need to position for customers and against competitors, their long-term brand development, geographic expansion plans, and so on. Startups shouldn’t act smug about this.

Balance Sheet 242

Balance Sheet Vertical Acquisition Revenue 242

VC Cafe

JANUARY 27, 2021

–JJ Oslund, The Startup. Bizzabo is on fire these days, though it could have been easy to predict a downfall for the events-tech startup when the coronavirus froze an industry worth 500 billion dollars. Next47 and American Insight Partners VC, demonstrates growing trust in its current and future business model.

Vertical 148

Vertical Video Technical Review Europe 148

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.

Customer Development 267

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

View from Seed

JUNE 23, 2022

Automating their end-to-end eCommerce operations (from managing inventory to order fulfillment to customer service). RH: Who are your customers? Long-term: Influencers across the world with 10K+ followers and across all major verticals (e.g. legal, bank accounts, government filings, etc) behind setting up a startup.

DC 156

DC Cambodia eCommerce Social Media 156

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development.

Customer Development 244

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. While this sounds inexplicable to an outside observer, sometimes it makes sense. Other times it’s just plain dumb.

Customer 216

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 216

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 284

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 284

Startup Professionals Musings

OCTOBER 23, 2021

While these may be necessary for funding, they may not be sufficient to make your startup the great success embodied in your vision. It also starts with a good summary of the intangibles, summarized as the five rules of relevancy, by Mark Zawacki: A startup needs to be relevant and stay relevant. A startup must gain balanced traction.

Early Stage 379

Early Stage Vertical Sales Global 379

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

And he recognized it was making his startup feel and act like a big ponderous company. Most decisions in a startup must be made in the face of uncertainty. Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one.

Silicon Valley 307

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 307

VC Cafe

MAY 21, 2024

Their scale and resources enable them to innovate rapidly, making it challenging for startups to compete directly in this space. If startups do decide to compete on this ground floor, then they need to raise billions of dollars, most of which seems more like a Capex expense. Native GenAi companies should leverage that cost advantage.

Generative AI 97

Generative AI ChatGPT Vertical B2B 97

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

A version of this article appeared in the Harvard Business Review. The entrepreneur who founded and grew the largest startup in the world to $10 billion in revenue and got fired is someone you have probably never heard of. Within each brand there were several models at different price points. The next year, 1910, trouble hit.

Michigan 296

Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 296

Hearpreneur

FEBRUARY 19, 2023

With the evolution of technology, there's room for so much more but the requirements are becoming extremely competitive as consumer behavior is evolving, with the need for personalization, interactivity, engagement, and an epic customer journey. Thanks to Denise Hemke, Checkr ! #3- Thanks to Matt Bowman, Thrive Internet Marketing Agency ! #9-

Artificial Inteligence 110

Artificial Inteligence Technical Review Entrepreneur Global 110

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 13, 2015

Often your best estimate of any metric or market behavior or business model component is at best accurate within a power of ten, for example “expected conversion rate between 0.5% and 5%” or “cost to acquire a customer between $50 and $500″ or “average monthly revenue per customer between $20 and $200.”

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

But have you ever had the opportunity to pick the brains of founders who created amazingly successful startups and companies like Envato , Backblaze , Simple , or Treehouse ? If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. Figure out what your milestones are – customers, pageviews, revenue, etc. –

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Posted on December 7, 2009 by steveblank In my 21 years of startups, I had my ideas “stolen” twice. Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked.

Silicon Valley 253

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

Startup Professionals Musings

JANUARY 6, 2019

While these may be necessary for funding, they may not be sufficient to make your startup the great success embodied in your vision. It also starts with a good summary of the intangibles, summarized as the five rules of relevancy, by Mark Zawacki: A startup needs to be relevant and stay relevant. A startup must gain balanced traction.

Startup 242

Startup Early Stage Vertical Sales 242

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 1, 2023

By Daniel Sokolovksy, Co-Founder and CEO, WARP and Troy Lester, Co-Founder and CRO, WARP The dissolution of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was more than just a bank collapse, it was a reality check for both startups and the VCs that fund them. So what does an early-stage company do to avoid the doom and gloom plaguing the world of startups?

Early Stage 115

Early Stage Los Angeles Silicon Valley Cofounder 115

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Scalable startups are on a trajectory for a billion dollar market cap. Not all start ups want to go in that direction – some will opt instead to become a small business. There’s nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. What’s the playbook for your region or country to make it so?

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2020

Sapient’s Sam Parks and Martin Koch have developed a smart outlet system for commercial deployment The Forrest Four-Cast: January 28, 2020 If Sam Parks , CEO and co-founder of Sapient Industries , weren’t working for his startup, he’d be working as a scientist, using his background in nanotechnology as an applied physicist. Who does it serve?

Philadelphia 62

Philadelphia Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Pennsylvania 62

Hearpreneur

AUGUST 10, 2022

It drives media attention and fosters customer retention rate, which is why most companies strive to have it in their mission statement. It seeks to solve customer problems in a better and more modern way and help such companies edge over the competition. And as we all know, wowing the customer over and over is no easy task.

Entrepreneur 124

Entrepreneur Technical Review Non-Compete Software Review 124

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully-formed go to market function.”. A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. Organize events in your vertical. Customer Development.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

TDaaS uses 3D content to automate the creation of pre-annotated synthetic image data to train Vision AI models. Their algorithms control the placement of 3D content into custom environments, which can be created in massive parallel variations. What has the startup experience taught you about life?

Technical Review 63

Technical Review Los Angeles Cofounder Silicon Valley 63

David Cohen

AUGUST 22, 2012

As an example, one of the areas that I like to invest in is vertical search. With vertical search, it’s all about the crack. Vertical search is one of those areas where I think freemium can still make a ton of sense. I had a meeting today with the vertical search company that I recently funded.

Vertical 110

Vertical Search Business Model Software Developers 110

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

I first met Evangelos Simoudis when he ran IBM’s Business Intelligence Solutions Division and then as CEO of his first startup Customer Analytics. and the emergence of new industries, markets and customers. Evangelos has spent the last 15 years as a Venture Capitalist, first at Apax Partners and later at Trident Capital.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Venture Capital United States Technical Review 120

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 23, 2020

Syndio has over 60 enterprise customers including Nordstrom, Match Group, Target, Adobe and PagerDuty and already more than 1.3 What has the startup experience taught you about life? If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17. million employees on the platform.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Seattle Elevator Pitch Equity 62

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

Votem Founder and CEO Pete Martin is a successful serial entrepreneur, with more than 25 years of experience in the technology business and enterprise-software space, and author of the upcoming book, “ Sparking a Mobile Revolution: How Mobile Voting Will Change the World as We Know It. ” What has the startup experience taught you about life?

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Cleveland Software Review Iowa 62

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 30, 2013

While these may be necessary for funding, they may not be sufficient to make your startup the great success embodied in your vision. In the last couple of years, perhaps in reaction to some business atrocities leading to the recent Recession, I am seeing a renewed focus on other less tangible attributes which can set your startup apart.

Startup 293

Startup Early Stage Vertical Sales 293

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Posted on June 11, 2009 by steveblank When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail – badly.

Cofounder 229

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 229

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Useful blogs and links for startups Click Here ————– 2.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. Ultimately you want to see if you can find customers and a market for the product as specified – as early as possible.

Vertical 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 28, 2012

While these may be necessary for funding, they may not be sufficient to make your startup the great success embodied in your vision. This is not the total opportunity out there, and not the total target market, but the subset of customers who have and will spend the money you need to cure their pain. A startup must gain traction.

Startup 247

Startup Early Stage Vertical Sales 247

Version One Ventures

JULY 21, 2020

The startup market evolves, and so do we as VCs. No matter the vertical, geography, business model, macro or micro trends, entrepreneurs form the nucleus of a generational company. Technology changes. Over the past few months, we’ve reflected on our journey over the past decade, who we are and what we invest in.

Founder 213

Founder Vertical Differentiation Portfolio 213

Hunter Walker

JULY 18, 2022

Why I’m Not Telling Every Startup To ‘Pull The Brakes’ Just Yet. Multiples dropped in public and private markets, growth expectations were cut, and business models with high spend for promise of future ROI became quite unfavorable. Are you indispensable for customers? This is challenging but definitely not impossible.

Valuation 116

Valuation Cap Table Startup Later Stage 116

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 17, 2016

While these may be necessary for funding, they may not be sufficient to make your startup the great success embodied in your vision. In the last few years, perhaps in reaction to the business integrity issues leading to the recession back in 2008, I am seeing a renewed focus on other less tangible attributes which can set your startup apart.

Startup 120

Startup Early Stage Vertical Sales 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Customers (who are the users, payers, buyers, etc.) For some of the teams their expectation was if they built the product customers will come.

Customer 261

Customer Cloud EC2 Channel 261

Mucker Lab

OCTOBER 12, 2016

Just six months ago, VCs were publishing white papers extolling the virtue of non-bank lending startups, but now no one will touch them with a 10-foot pole. Vertical integration of different funding risks. Whatever happened to IoT after Nest? The average (or even above average) horse never wins. The road ahead for entrepreneurs.

Harvest 60

Harvest Vertical IPO Early Stage 60