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.

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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.

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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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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. would look in each of the verticals. Is marketing different if you’re in the cleantech business versus medical devices?

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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. Keep you office running lean and mean. Is your service being replaced? But don’t worry.

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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. Keep you office running lean and mean. Is your service being replaced? But don’t worry.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

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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. Keep you office running lean and mean. entrepreneur Patricia Sigmon plateau profits startup' But don’t worry.

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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. what Market Type is your startup? Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. The goal of the class was to get them to understand that in a startup, that was the norm not the exception. Using the business model canvas, the changes to their business were obvious.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Many thanks, you’ve changed my startup a hundred times already. Maybe the core of what you talk about in getting companies to success lies in the answer to these 2 questions. Oh, I absolutely love your “I was having coffee with person the other day&# stories. Keep ‘em coming.

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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. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

There is no certainty about a startup on day-one. You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. At each startup I couldn’t wait to do this. Faith-based Entrepreneurship At first, entrepreneurship is a Faith-based initiative.

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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.

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all startups. Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs.

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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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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. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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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!

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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. Elephant Graveyard Reinvention of large companies, while making for great case studies are rare.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. In a startup the role of Customer Development is to: test the founders hypothesis about the customer problem test if the product concept and minimum feature set solve that problem This is a big idea and worth repeating.

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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.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Reply Mark Essel , on July 2, 2009 at 9:14 am Said: Reality distortion field isn’t the basic technique covered in startups 101? Reply Wyatt ODay , on July 2, 2009 at 8:18 am Said: Great post, Steve. I love all these war stories. If entrepreneurs can’t imagine and convince us that we can achieve the impossible, who will?

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www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

25 Best Startup Failure Post-Mortems of All Time. Update – As a followup, we analyzed all of these startup failure post-mortems to identify the top 20 reasons for startup failure. Also worth a read after you review these startup failure post-mortems. Post-Mortem Title : How My Startup Failed.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. I couldn’t figure out if I was more perturbed about how casual the comment was or how insightful it was.

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Hype before shipping any product is an obvious flaw, but what about hyping products that have shipped but have zero business model? era&# , but really interested in your take on these “free&# models through the prism of Customer Development. Rocket Science seems to be a bit of an extreme case though.

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Almost every university, region and car wash now has a business plan competition; the rules, who can participate, how large the prizes and who are the judges vary by school. Over scrambled eggs and diet coke, I listened to this seasoned startup veteran describe the excitement of his students who came to the U.S. to compete.

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David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

See Bessemer Venture Partners’ A comprehensive guide to security for startups. Data companies focused on early-stage startups include Aingel , fundsUP , Preseries , PredictLeads , and Sploda. For more on gathering data and using it to assess companies, see How to Assess Startups Using Machine Learning. 2) Market . 8) Monitor .

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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.

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

At these startups both the problem and solution were unknown. 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. Startups were doing discovery of the problem and solution in real-time.

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Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 26, 2020

What has the startup experience taught you about life? The founding process extremely challenging and when things get hard you need people to lean on both for advice and support! If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17. Who you surround yourself with is everything.

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Up and Running

OCTOBER 31, 2017

It also provides the perfect opportunity for you to launch and grow your own startup. For some online businesses, the startup capital is actually a lot lower. Achieving a degree of financial freedom is an ideal springboard to launching and growing your startup. . So how do people achieve financial freedom? Just start.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

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

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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. Photo Credit: Stefanie Tacata. crew, Aeropostale, etc. 13 – Take Our Time.

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