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Raising Money Using Customer Development

Steve Blank

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Entrepreneurs put together their funding presentation by extracting the key ideas from their business plan, putting them on PowerPoint/Keynote and pitching the company – until they get funded or exhausted.

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No One Wins In Business Plan Competitions

Steve Blank

Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. At best I think business plan competitions are a waste of time.

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Qualcomm’s Corporate Entrepreneurship Program – Lessons Learned (Part 2)

Steve Blank

I earnestly believe that large corporations should emulate Lean Startups (Business model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering.) However, they need to match a top-level (board, CEO, exec staff) agreement on strategy and structure. Lessons Learned.

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Why Build, Measure, Learn – isn’t just throwing things against the wall to see if they work

Steve Blank

It’s a really big idea because what you build needs to match the hypothesis you want to test. The minimum viable product you’ll need to build to find the right customers is different from the minimum viable product you need for testing pricing, which is different from an MVP you would build to test specific product features.

Lean 120
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The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 4: Customer Hypotheses

Steve Blank

The Agora team started the week wondering whether they were 1) a true marketplace for cloud computing, where they provide both matching and exchange capabilities for real-time trading. Or were they 2) an information exchange, providing matching services for cloud computing buyers and sellers, providing matching services.

Customer 234
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Hacking for Defense @ Stanford 2021 Lessons Learned Presentations

Steve Blank

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.

Lean 385
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The Class That Changed the Way Entrepreneurship is Taught

Steve Blank

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