Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. For example, some startup sales execs believe hiring the core sales team is a key objective.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.”

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 147

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building? How many are there? Can it scale?”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. a customer before you try and build a business. That’s in stark contrast to the traditional Product Development Model where it’s expected a customer is already there and waiting and it’s simply a matter of [.]

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.”

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 126

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

Filed under: Family/Career « Let’s Fire Our Customers Durant Versus Sloan – Part 1 » 3 Responses Twitter Trackbacks for Unintended Lessons « Steve Blank [steveblank.com] on Topsy.com , on September 28, 2009 at 10:04 am Said: [.]

North Carolina 146

North Carolina Silicon Valley RSS Connecticut 146

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Eighty some pages later I realized that a) I had some great war stories as a good marketeer and failed CEO, b) I’d have to pay my wife and kids to read them, c) the three of them were probably the entire total available market, and d) when I looked at what I had done and what other entrepreneurs had done at their startups, that there was a pattern.

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Redemption Silicon Valley RSS California 127

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery. It’s a process that doesn’t exist in large companies with existing customers and markets.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 128

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Modern Corporation Marketing At the same time General Motors also revolutionized automotive marketing by creating multiple brands of cars, each with its own identity targeted at a specific economic bracket of American customers. Within each brand there were several models at different price points.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Dinner in a Strange Land When I was in my mid 20′s working at ESL, I was sent overseas to a customer site where the customers were our three-letter intelligence agencies. The conversation happened to hit on politics and culture and my friend’s’ wife innocently offered up she had lived in a commune in California.

Silicon Valley 191

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc. Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And that’s just to get started. Let me know what you think.

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

How to Enchant Your Customer - How to Change the World , November 23, 2010 I love to do business with small businesses—in-store, online, for myself, for others, for pleasure, for work—it doesn’t matter to me. love to find great products and services made by entrepreneurs who are trying to change the world. billion dollar mistake.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

In the real world, most business plans don’t survive the first few months of customer contact. And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan. Preparing for a year is not the best way to spend time, rather getting customers is the better way to an Investor’s heart.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 143

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

October 2012 – Erin Turner and Gagan Biyani host the first Growth Hackers Conference in Menlo Park, California. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is marketing. […] Welcome to growth hacking. via TechCrunch). PR and publicity drive attention…to drive sales.

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Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Silicon Valley’s development is intimately entwined with the long history of industrialization and innovation in the larger San Francisco Bay Area. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens. Truth be told, we've got defense contractors here just like California does too. September 9, 2009 12:36 AM Richard Tibbetts said.

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 127

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 30, 2008

It ended with a large layoff and a transfer of jobs from NY to California and Bangalore. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? In the end, the team that he put together was severely dysfunctional and worked much worse than the one he inherited. The moral of the story?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 83

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I lived through the time when working in my first job in Ann Arbor Michigan we had to get out a map to find out that San Jose was not only in Puerto Rico but there was a city with that same name in California. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. The founders.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

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www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Customer service. Google Custom Search Engine. Customer Relationship Management. great web customer acquisition tutorials. customer retention, churn reduction, lifetime value. free/cheap web customer relationship mgmt software. Codeacademy. Steve Blank.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53