SoCal CTO

JUNE 9, 2010

If you can just be friendly enough and get your users to party with you, the rest is really easy. prefer instead to divide it according to the mindset of users: whether or not they are actively looking to purchase something (i.e. They’re deep into Customer Development ,” he said. There is a much better technique.

Fractional CTO 248

Fractional CTO Startup Venture Capital Cofounder 248

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.

Wiki 312

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 312

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

There’s nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. With 317 million people the U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

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. They did an online survey of 200 existing users (~5% response rate). This post is part three.

Cloud 232

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 232

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups built every possible feature the founding team envisioned (using “Waterfall development,”) into a monolithic “release” of the product taking months or years to build a first product release. The Business Plan (Concept- Alpha-Beta - FCS ) became the playbook for startups. and aim for hundreds of millions of customers.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

Data from the Startup Genome project shows that startups that have helpful mentors, listen to customers, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth. Angel investments in mobile and web apps today are approaching the “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” strategy.

Silicon Valley 292

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 292

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

Data from the Startup Genome project shows that startups that have helpful mentors, listen to customers, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth. Angel investments in mobile and web apps today are approaching the “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” strategy.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 263

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. By listening to their users.

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Agile 128

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.

Business Model 84

Business Model API Wiki Seed Stage 84

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 250

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

You’d have a lot easier time getting a great technical co-founder to join you if your initial prototype had 20,000 users and growing. It’s actually pretty hard to find a good start-up job if you have no real engineering or user acquisition / product management skills. Traction (the Catch 22 option). davetomback Great post.

Cofounder 43

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

It sounds like youre assuming that your execution will be flawless, even something to be copied by competitors, but how can you know without testing it on the customer? Ideas are worthless when theyre another spin on a web 2.0 It was yet another Web 2.0 social network/web analysis/etc. Hint: these arent real businesses.

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Surprisingly, I was thinking the same thing today about user-generated content, which basically check-in's are too. 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. If network B has 20 users than it’s value is 400 (20*20).

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

ConversionXL

JANUARY 28, 2013

The premise is simple: observe real users use and interact with your website, pay attention to their experiences and try to spot patterns. User testing gives you direct input on how real users use your site. Because you are not your user. Users think differently. The information you get is pure gold. Image credit.

Conversion 106

Conversion Silicon Valley Matching Design 106

rob.by

MARCH 8, 2012

Certainly using techniques such as customer development (www.custdev.com) and lean startup (minimum viable product) can help go a long way to giving the tech co-founder some early payback in terms of whether there will be any traction in the idea and reduce their inital involvment to get to prototype stage.

Technical Cofounder 42

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Engineering Fractional CTO 42

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

” Introduced a few months ago as an Austin event, I’m now doing this live audio advice column to the web, taking phone calls from startups around the country. How to move from a free to a paid product without losing all your users. So be sure to make a free user account and participate in the offline conversation there.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

SoCal CTO

SEPTEMBER 8, 2010

He blogs to 10,000 web entrepreneurs at Software by Rob and co-hosts the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us. What Apple proved, and what I suspect is the issue with web content, is that monetization was a product problem. Like it or not, you are now entering the dreaded realm of “formal business processes.” Final Thought.

Startup 191

Startup CTO Hire Cofounder Venture Capital 191

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. Gattiker said.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

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.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

These diagrams are the visual representation of the how and the what a team learned in the class – how they tested their hypotheses by getting out of the building using the Customer Development process and what they learned about each part of their business model. is just another engineering process, not building a business.

Lean 281

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 281

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 27, 2012

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. As we walked up the valley Satish kept up a running dialog catching me up on six years of family, classmates and how he started his consumer web company. Five Cups of Coffee.

Customer 326

Customer Business Model Customer Development Startup 326

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Ask your existing users this question via a survey. What is the best advice you can give for finding a business partner? How can we reward our top users without money and without appearing too big brotherish? Only if you’re doing it with the intention to learn about the market and customers. A few thoughts.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

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. Those paying customers provide IMVU with sufficient profits to reinvest in the core experience for everyone. And this is true outside of games.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" Web Development Startups Solo Founders I am a creative guy with a startup idea. Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life? 5 Comments 30 Answers Tristan Kromer , I help entrepreneurs find co-founders. 5 Comments 30 Answers Tristan Kromer , I help entrepreneurs find co-founders.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

grasshopperherder.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

I just need a co-founder to web enable it!" Reply Josh Strike says: January 18, 2011 at 10:50 am Tristan, the only thing I disagree with on an emotional level is the NDA business. Obviously if the only thing they’re “protecting&# is a business model, then you’re right.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder NDA Founder Sweat Equity 47

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2011

Conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. And finding product/market fit in that chaos requires a team with a combination of skills. What skills?

Startup 325

Startup Lean Engineer Business Model 325

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. This lets them deliver a series of minimal viable products to customers in a fraction of the time.

Restful 227

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 227

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

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

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Once you have a first version of your app running, you can use the tools on this site to get it into the hands of users and to get paid.” Amazon Web Services. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Web Tools: Hereâ??s Twilio : Need to call/txt get a phone number from your web/mobile application?

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53