Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Learning could be about product features, customer needs, the right pricing and distribution channel, etc.) Rather it is the simplest thing that you can show to customers to get the most learning at that point in time. They are: value proposition, product/service the company offers (along with its benefits to customers).

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

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. We were positing that 20 years of teaching “how to write a business plan” might be obsolete. Would we signs of success early?

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

How can we attract buyers to our channel before they make purchasing decisions? Longer-term work/planning: what other experiments should we be constructing. The Agora team decided to formalize the customer discovery process by coming up with a set of Customer Discovery principles and questions that were as good as any I’ve seen.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

JULY 14, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Alexander Osterwalder – inventor of the Business Model Canvas. Because customers don’t care about your idea. … Do your customers want your value proposition? But large companies continue to ask for business plans.”.

Channel 120

Channel Business Model Cofounder Business Plan 120

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S.

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

For example, one of the critical business model hypotheses they could test locally is Product/Market fit – the connection between their Value Proposition (what product or service they were building) and the Customer Segment (who they were building it for.). They intended to get scale for their business by growing in the U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

To be honest I built the class out of frustration watching schools teach aspiring entrepreneurs that all they need to know is how to write a business plan or how to sit in an incubator building a product. Quotes from customers that illustrated learnings and insights. Every week the teams present their results. Pivot stories.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 14, 2014

A pivot can change any of nine different things in your business model. A pivot may mean you changed your customer segment, your channel, revenue model/pricing, resources, activities, costs, partners, customer acquisition – lots of other things than just the product. A Pivot is not just changing the product.

Business Model 330

Business Model Lean Customer Development Channel 330

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 ? Don’t Throw the Tomatoes.

Search 320

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 320

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The idea of a Business Model competition first emerged when I realized that Business Plan writing ought to be taught in English Departments – as they’re the best example of creative writing entrepreneurs will ever do. The Business Plan ?- And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination.

Business Model 263

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 263

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Notice that the traditional product introduction model leads to a product launch and the execution of a revenue plan. The revenue numbers and revenue model came from a startups original Business Plan. that make up a business model. All of these initial assumptions must be right for the revenue plan to be correct.

Burn Rate 247

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

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. This is more challengine than it appears, and method of insulation is supporting varied input channels.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Many entrepreneurship courses focus on teaching students “how to write a business plan.” If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. This class is not about how to write a business plan.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. Klout Puts Metrics Into Social Media Management - Tim Berry's Blog - Planning Startups Stories , May 21, 2010 I really like klout.com for three good reasons: 1.) it’s about measuring online influence and I’m big on metrics as a key element of business planning; 2.)

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 9, 2012

In fact, you could say that all that remains from my last book are the four steps of Customer Development. Integrates Alexander Osterwalders “Business Model Canvas” as the front-end and “scorecard” for the customer discovery process. Briefly, the new book.

Entrepreneur 289

Entrepreneur Lean Business Model Customer Development 289

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2014

They could have never figured this out sitting inside a classroom writing a business plan. The Customer Development process, this relentless drive to turn hypotheses into facts is what makes this learning so rapid. At week six they were trying to figure out their distribution channel ( here ) after another pivot.

Lean 272

Lean Silicon Valley Customer Development Incubator 272

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2010

One of the toughest problems for entrepreneurs is to keep score as they search for their business model. One of the key concepts of Customer Development is writing down your initial hypotheses (guesses) of all the parts of your business model, then updating them with the facts you find outside the building. Keeping Score.

Customer Development 211

Customer Development Business Model Early Stage Channel 211

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

Do your research and validate your idea: You’re probably going to be doing this at the same time as you write your business plan. It’s the lean format of the business plan—the format that will allow you to adapt fastest as you progress through the startup phase. Your customer. The problem you are solving.

Curation 60

Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

As a founder you start out with: 1) a vision of a product with a set of features, 2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? What’s the distribution channel. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. Business Plan Versus Business Model.

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known. Startups are in fact only temporary organizations, organized to search –not execute–for a scalable and repeatable business model. Yet this isn’t an incubator.

Lean 256

Lean Business Model Agile United States 256

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As a formal method, the Lean Startup consists of three parts: The Business Model Canvas – to frame hypotheses, Customer Development – to test those hypotheses in front of customers, and Agile Engineering – to build Minimum Viable Products to maximize learning. Customer Segments is changed to Beneficiaries.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. Every large company, whether it can articulate it or not, is executing a proven business model (s).

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 28, 2010

In a startup the search for a business model is chaotic, unpredictable and uncertain. Yet the Customer Development process uses a series of checklists to ensure that you walk through the Customer Discovery and Validation steps. Customer Hypothesis Checklist.

Business Model 239

Business Model Customer Development Engineer Vesting 239

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I hate business plan competitions. I Love Business Plan Competitions I had a breakfast with a friend who has founded a few companies in Thailand and started the New Ventures Program at one of their universities. For all the reasons why business plan competitions are wonderful for students from outside the U.S.,

Business Plan 140

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 140

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

Students formed 5-person teams, came up with a business idea then got out of the building to validate their business model. Our goal was not to teach the students to write a business plan nor were we trying to teach them how to give a pitch to VC’s. A Startup is a Search For A Business Model.

Intellectual Property 226

Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 226

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

That means in their core business, large companies have a series of knowns. They’ve found product/market fit (what products customers want to buy). They’ve learned the best distribution channel to get the product from their company to the customer. and how to price the product.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

Since we had gotten out of the software business when we came out of Chapter 11 , and our sales channel didn’t know what to do with software, we licensed ReelTime to Adobe. But you probably never heard of ReelTime. You may know it by its final name. It was fun watching it happen.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

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.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2011

By now the nine teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad Class were formed, In the four days between team formation and this class session we tasked them to: Write down their initial hypotheses for the 9 components of their company’s business model (who are the customers? what distribution channel? what’s the product?

Business Model 236

Business Model Nebraska Peru Germany 236

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2015

How startup ideas are developed and nurtured was the focus of conversations with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on Sirius XM Channel 111. He had to write four business plans to get the OK to open his barbershop. ” I wrote a second business plan and it showed how I would pay them.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Channel Programming Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

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. and report the results of face-to-face customer discovery. This post is part three.

Cloud 228

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 228

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2016

Instead, he yearned to channel his creative energies. — Although a February appearance on the reality TV show SharkTank brought Clean Sleep some brand recognition, Michael is struggling to find a scalable business model. Until I got the machine to work, I hadn’t even thought about the business plan.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Fort Worth America Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

The show airs on SiriusXM Channel 111 (weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). You’re constantly critically analyze the gaps in someone’s business plan. Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111. . Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

The show airs on SiriusXM Channel 111 (weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). You’re constantly critically analyze the gaps in someone’s business plan. Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111. . Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

The concept of Partners , took some explanation as some teams confused partners with the Distribution Channel.). After a week of hectic customer discovery , the team further refined their new business model. We taught them theory, methodology, and practice using Customer Development and business model design.

South Dakota 217

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 217

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

With an out-of-this-world business plan. When it was spun out as a a separate company, Iridium’s 1990 business plan had assumptions about potential customers, their problems and the product needed to solve that problem. A Business Plan Frozen in Time. This business plan was a static document.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335