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. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. When I started Shapeways, complex software needed to be built and when I first reached out to developers, a lot of them laughed and told me it was impossible. Stay lean for as long as possible. Be creative, and stay lean. Find your niche. Don’t listen.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Venture Capitalists on your board developed the expertise to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 246

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Customer Development and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery.

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 5, 2013

A good many startups I know have been “successful” over a couple of years in overcoming the challenges of starting the business, including incorporation, services development, funding, and setting up operations. Ask employees what they would do to grow your business, fix business issues, or cut costs. Mix things up.

Entrepreneur 234

Entrepreneur Vertical Reputation Valuation 234

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. Is there a profitable business model? How many are there? Can it scale?”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 6, 2012

A good many startups I know have been “successful” over a couple of years in overcoming the challenges of starting the business, including incorporation, services development, funding, and setting up operations. Ask employees what they would do to grow your business, fix business issues, or cut costs. Mix things up.

Startup 236

Startup Vertical Reputation Valuation 236

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This week they were testing one of the most confusing sections of a company’s business model – Customer Relationships - the activities used to “Get, Keep and Grow” customers in a physical or virtual (web or mobile) channel.

Customer 252

Customer Cloud EC2 Channel 252

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 28, 2011

A good many startups I know have been “successful” over a couple of years in overcoming the challenges of starting the business, including incorporation, services development, funding, and setting up operations. Ask employees what they would do to grow your business, fix business issues, or cut costs. Mix things up.

Startup 230

Startup Vertical Reputation Valuation 230

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. Customer Development This strategy of starting on faith, and quickly turning them into facts is the core of the Customer Development process. Employ customer development.

Silicon Valley 219

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 219

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.” Customer Development is about Testing the Founder’s Hypothesis Any idiot can get outside the building and ask customers what they want, compile a feature list and hand it to engineering.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 280

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 421

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 421

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Filed under: Ardent , Family/Career , Technology « Times Square Strategy Session – Web Startups and Customer Development Customer Development: Past, Present, Future » 17 Responses Mark Essel , on November 19, 2009 at 6:55 am Said: Haha, closure is well worth the effort when an entertaining tale can be shared!

Silicon Valley 191

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 191

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Some of the conversations went like this: Startup 1 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and have been following the Customer Development process and I’ve talked to lots of customers.” Rule 2 : In an existing market Customer Development means understanding whether your hypothesis of why customers will buy match reality.

Silicon Valley 188

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 188

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. So the first heuristic is: do not assume the startup rules are the same for all vertical markets. Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

Vertical 151

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 151

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

For the first 25 years HP’s business model was static. Of course HP did ship new products and innovate, but their center of innovation was sustaining innovation , around the core of their existing business. I think it is perfectly healthy and desirable for companies to go out of business. DO NOT develop a computer!&#

Silicon Valley 169

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 169

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

TripAdvisor may be one of the most fascinating companies I know and so I was excited to dig into their business model as part of my series on scaling. TripAdvisor is more of a classic consumer Internet success story, but with even more powerful network effects and an amazing business model. Really hard. Magical, really.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Ps: my limited perspective comes with self recognition of a lack of hands on experience always enjoy it when I stop in to read here Steve Reply Aamir , on July 2, 2009 at 10:18 am Said: Awesome post Steve… but isn’t drawing the business model for a gaming company going to be easy? Make game, market, sell, profit?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Our “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” story played great in Silicon Valley, they ate it up in Hollywood, and the business press tripped over themselves to talk to us. Companies in the entertainment business around the world knew who we were, and were interested in meeting us, if only to see what the hype was about.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Rob Adams, the director of MootCorp, is doing an amazing job at providing value to all participants, whether it’s feedback on their business model or making the right introductions. MootCorp in particular has an impressive track record of putting early stage tech companies on the right path towards funding.

Business Plan 143

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 143

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant. I like my odds.

Founder 302

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

This provides us more time to develop meaningful relationships with prospects and customers. Lean Case provides standard business models & metrics, so you can apply a standard approach to business planning, modeling, and profitability tracking. the Untouched Vertical. 3) Raise capital.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

At the end, I asked myself what are the most critical resources I need to be successful and the answer was partners and developers. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. Author : Todd.

Software Review 79

Software Review Startup Technical Review Vesting 79

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets , and with my team of vertical marketers , I thought I had achieved absolution and redemption. But there was one fatal flaw.

Silicon Valley 178

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 178

Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

Hundreds of thousands of people worked on developing strategic weapons, bombers, our ICBM and SLBM missile programs, and the Apollo moon program. Startups were not just smaller versions of a large company, they were about invention, innovation and iteration - of business model, product, customers and on and on.

Silicon Valley 121

Silicon Valley RSS California Chad 121

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

One of 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2020 , Passbase is an off-the-shelf identity verification solution that allows developers, with just a few lines of code, to confirm the identity of users through a combination of liveness detection, one-to-one facial comparison, and forensic ID authenticity checks. Hard question.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Cofounder New York Software Review 62

Up and Running

OCTOBER 31, 2017

One of my all-time favorite entrepreneurs, and a man who has had such a profound impact on our world, Elon Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur who has created fortunes in a variety of industries and verticals. Some people may not know this, but Amazon actually started as a bookstore, operating on a business model similar to dropshipping.

Entrepreneur 121

Entrepreneur Affiliate Finance United States 121

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

interactions, widgets, effects Django – high-level Python framework Cappuccino – open source framework for app development Kodingen – cloud development environment, code editor, hosting service, collaboration platform.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Hearpreneur

JUNE 26, 2016

1 – Business Model. Our business is unique because our business model addresses 2 major shifts in the fashion industry today: 1) the rise of fast fashion and its affect on major more traditional fashion companies like Gap, J. We launched our own haircare product line which is a big part of our business.

Entrepreneur 92

Entrepreneur Technical Review Harvest Portfolio 92