Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, January 12, 2010 Amazing lean startup resources A year ago, there was no lean startup movement. I continue to believe that the explosion of interest in the lean startup has very little to do with me. If you are attempting to apply lean startup ideas in your own business - you are not alone.

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Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Class lectures were over last week, but most teams kept up the mad rush to talk to even more customers and further refine their products. Many entrepreneurship courses focus on teaching students “how to write a business plan.”

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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?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Marketers believe creating a killer web presence, corporate presentation, are objectives. The plan calls for selling in volume the day Engineering is finished building the product.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 18, 2010

Categories and indexes on the web pages aren’t quite the right metaphor or substitute for random access. After I retired, I began teaching Customer Development , a theory of how to reduce early stage risk in entrepreneurial ventures. The first time I taught the class at the Haas Business School, U.C.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Home Books for Startups Guide Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Tools Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Email Subscription Get Steve Blank via your RSS Feed RSS - Posts RSS - Comments Categories Air Force (12) Ardent (10) Audubon (1) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (39) Business Model versus Business Plan (..)

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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. Their objective is to get users, orders, customers, etc.

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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. The Lean LaunchPad Online Class. The Lean LaunchPad Online Class.

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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. It is web-based, fast and easy and soon to may be available on the iPhone.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 27, 2010

Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action. I won’t apologize for this aspect of the Lean Startup methodology. Lean manufacturing , agile software development , and Theory of Constraints are all examples of this idea in action.

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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

This lets them deliver a series of minimal viable products to customers in a fraction of the time. For products that are simply “bits” delivered over the web, a first product can be shipped in weeks rather than years. Today open source software has slashed the cost of software development from millions of dollars to thousands.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

The key things I want students to take from the class are: Understand that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a profitable business model. Learn how to put together a business model , not a business plan. They set up and keep the class web site updated. Class Logistics.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. Thats what business is designed to do.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. Constructing a working business model is a form of ecosystem design. Startup founders need to use their own judgment to ask: which is the riskiest assumption underlying my business plan?

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The guidelines I had originally proposed to my students worked for enterprise software or Web 2.0 Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0, The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. What is it that’s unique about the market I’m in?

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. Figuring this out takes time, and few entrepreneurs have the patience to wait it out, because the business plan does such a good job of explaining what customers are going to think. The problem is that customers dont read your business plan. Expo SF (May.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Step 1: Start with a lean plan. Instead of sitting down to write a 40-page business plan, start with a one-page pitch. It’s the fastest way to get your idea onto paper, and it’s the very first step in the lean planning process, which is much easier and more iterative than traditional business planning methods.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

For the rest of us, there is an alternative: to create credibility by building a lean startup. We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. The only folks who invested in me were the ones who barely understood the business plan.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2011

We spent a year screwing it up in our Lean LaunchPad classes until we figured out it was about having the right team. So as a first step we made students formally apply and interview for the Lean LaunchPad class. Conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Certainly venture-backed startups don’t have this luxury – every business plan has a model in it. This model of joint accountability is at the heart of the lean startup, and is just as applicable to venture-backed, bootstrapped, and enterprise startups. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

It surely lifted my spirits once again in my quest to seek funding from venture capitalists and to keep silencing my critics and proving them that i can achieve my milestones and goals in my very ambitious web application. I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. Thanks Steve!

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

We just had our app support a few tens of thousands of customers, and it did well. Some combination of the dot-com crash and a just terrible business plan prevented us from having to take our scalability problems to the next level. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity. The Business Plan (Concept- Alpha-Beta - FCS ) became the playbook for startups. 2001 – 2010: Back to Basics: The Lean Startup.

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Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory – income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models, 5-year forecasts, etc. And they’ll do this using the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Amazon Web Services. Lean Methodology Sources. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Part 3- Lean Cust. Web Tools: Hereâ??s We have an iOS SDK as well, for web-web, mobile-mobile, web-mobile video chat and video messaging. Mobile Tools: If you are a web developer, you donâ??t

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. 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.

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Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. The Agora Cloud Services team was now making a tool set for managing Amazon Web Services cloud compute usage. They believed their tools could save customers 30% of their Amazon bill. Veritas turbines.

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South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 217

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that. However, for the Web 2.0

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

What sets this approach apart from practices like using focus groups is that companies base product development decisions not just on what customers say they want but on how they vote with their wallets. The Inc story, and many others, does a good job emphasizing its lean-ness. Read the rest. Read the rest.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

Ali G meets with business leaders and investors on Wall Street to learn how to create a new company around a new product idea. After some general lessons, he then proposes his first product idea, complete with flip charts, business plan, and marketing plan. Labels: customer development 3comments: Anonymoussaid.

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 1, 2011

From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory - income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models - seems like another planet. And they'll do this using the business model-customer development-agile development solution stack.

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I’d been around the web long enough to remember the dozens of companies before YouTube that tried to create crowdsourced video sites and failed. Storm Clouds - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 12, 2010 We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. What went wrong?

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, November 5, 2008 Getting educated about advertising, agencies, and media buyers I see lots of startups whose business plans revolve around selling high-value ad space to brand advertisers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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VC Cafe

MARCH 22, 2011

VC Cafe: What was the point where you decided, there’s no point in running with the old business plan? Ian Small: The consumer-facing tokbox.com business is healthy with 2 million registered users, and has continued to grow since we launched OpenTok in late November 2010.

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Business Model API Wiki Seed Stage 84

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

Funding for the companies spinning out of Stanford’s engineering department in the 1950’s benefited from the tight integration and web of relationships between Fred Terman, Stanford, the U.S. These technology startups had no risk capital – just customers/purchase orders from government/military/intelligence agencies. There was none.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

One can see how it ripples through the entire business plan. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. for Harvard Business Revie.

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grasshopperherder.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

Unless your name is Eric Ries and it’s called “ lean startup.&# (Seriously, you’d be surprised how often this comes up.) …and lastly Don’t Negotiate with Me I’m sure that there are a lot of people who will disagree with me on this because it’s largely a question of corporate culture.

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