Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2016

The cross-disciplinary class brings students from widely divergent backgrounds together in teams of three to five, each aiming to tackle a gnarly international problem vexing Foggy Bottom in just 10 weeks by applying Lean LaunchPad methodology. Students also got a crash course on customer discovery in the foreign policy universe. “Get

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Lean Saudi Arabia Austria Silicon Valley 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 227

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. Let’s Fire Our Customers Part of the DNA of great entrepreneurs is a bias towards decisive and immediate action. Get it done, now.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 214

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2018

(Almost) everything you need to know (but are afraid to ask) before you wistfully ask a product manager to coffee so they will help you find a job. TL;DR Product management is a unique and poorly understood discipline, especially as it applies to software and other tech-related companies.

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Management Product Technical Review Software Review 85

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers. We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customer development. How dare you,” the fab manager said. “We

San Jose 259

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 259

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

And there are more to come: your first job, getting married, buying a house, having a child, becoming a manager, starting a company, retirement – and eventually commencement speaker. When I retired after 21 years working in 8 startups, I was invited to be a guest lecturer at the business school at the University of California Berkeley.

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Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 223

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# Context here.) To a person they became passionate evangelists and effective marketers.

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 218

Mike Michalowicz

FEBRUARY 28, 2018

Tip 1: Improve Your Customer Service | Dr. Eric White, OD. His practice, Complete Family Vision Care Optometry, is in San Diego, California. Dr. Aaron Neufeld, OD is an Owner/Optometrist at Los Altos Optometric Group in Los Altos, California. Steve Vargo, OD, MBA is a practice management consultant at IDOC.

San Diego 111

San Diego Technical Review California Retention 111

Steve Blank

APRIL 21, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment with a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Last week the teams tested their hypotheses about Customer Relationships (how do they get, keep and grow customers.) its product or service) to its customers. Parts one through five are here , Syllabus is here.

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Channel Artificial Inteligence San Francisco Business Model 231

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

The first step was to recruit a new management team. They sold to a set of customers I knew nothing about. After talking to its resellers and customers I realized that SuperMac was the only company that could be described as “fifth in a group of three.” Why they were looking to me to run marketing wasn’t clear. I took the job.

Silicon Valley 161

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2017

Guest Post by Misti Yang, Writer for Lean Startup Co. This is the mantra of Lean teams described by Eric Ries in his upcoming book, The Startup Way. Drawing on the advice of experts and recent research, here are seven insights on how to best build a Lean team. A hallmark of Lean teams is cross-functionality. Start small.

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Lean San Francisco Employee California 140

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

This year, with the kids grown, their choice was to fly up from Southern California and spend the holidays at our ranch. So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. I hope we managed to teach our children compassion and charity for others.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. Oh, and since it was not code compatible with anything, we were going to have to port all the key scientific applications our customers needed (as soon as we figured out who they were.) The response from across the country? We’re building a supercomputer.”

North Carolina 129

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 129

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.

Technology 142

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 142

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc.

Silicon Valley 305

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Hearpreneur

JUNE 4, 2021

These are keepsake cards and many of our customers tell us that the recipients frame their cards. 9- Providing Legitimate B2B Customer Data in the Era of Mistrust. That's when I was struck by the idea: Why not provide a legit B2B customer database that is neither dodgy and nor a bad fit for a business? that add texture.

Entrepreneur 135

Entrepreneur B2B Database Technical Review 135

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

Silicon Valley 129

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 129

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

A partner allows me the flexibility to miss a session or two (my job as a California Coastal Commissioner meets three days every month up and down the coast of California.) TA’s make managing 60 students working on cases and team projects manageable. Finally our TA’s managed the mentors we had supporting the students.

Business Model 235

Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 235

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Lessons to Learn By the time I joined Ardent I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit. Get Out of My Company At the top of his lungs he screamed, “You don’t know a damn thing about what these customers need!

Silicon Valley 282

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 282

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Cray’s first customers were the U.S. At Ardent our hypothesis was that if we could build a desktop supercomputer powerful enough to run and display these numerical simulations there were enough customers to make this a big business. I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications.

Silicon Valley 163

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Luckily while I was teaching classes at headquarters, Zilog’s field application engineers (the technical engineers working alongside our salesmen) would work side-by-side with our large customers as they designed their systems with our chips. Customers The irony is that Zilog had no idea who would eventually become its largest customers.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 195

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Oh, and we had no installed customer base. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer.

Silicon Valley 331

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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. Yet time after time, after the product shipped, startups would find that customers didn’t use or want most of the features.

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Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 238

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. The most extreme case (and my personal favorite) was by Armstrong who managed to create a full single conversion superheterodyne receiver all using a single vacuum tube! Who would have known? Armstrong was a god!

Silicon Valley 294

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 294

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. I was met by a very apologetic manager who said, “We’ve been trying to get a hold of you for the last week. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired.

Agile 263

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 263

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. it was the speed of the applications that customers were using to get their work done. So I was going to give our customers metrics neither they or anyone else had ever seen before.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 126

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 25, 2021

Carbon Health is now running some of the largest vaccination sites in California, most famously at Dodger Stadium, in partnership with the City of Los Angeles. So, we actually took the original live customer application, converting their live video dating application. So, that's how I came to Silicon Valley in the first place.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Turkey Los Angeles California 60

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

We can’t bring customers to this rundown building. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. If the management team is thinking they’ve made it, the new building is just symptomatic of a company heading for a crash. Stay hungry, stay lean.

Silicon Valley 226

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 226

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 28, 2020

With the theme “Build Back Better” Jerry Engel , Pete Newell , Steve Weinstein and I co-hosted nearly 500 Lean Educators from 63 countries and 235 universities online for a three-hour session to share what we’ve learned about educators on how we can help our communities rebound, adjust, and recover. Would customers sit for virtual interviews?

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Lean Community San Jose Africa 422

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

But underlying the company’s existence was a fundamental hypothesis we refused to see or test - customers would care if we did. Our potential customers didn’t seem to be calling for Hollywood stories, characters and narrative. Our customers wanted to kill, shoot or hunt for something. That’s OK, because we knew better.

Silicon Valley 221

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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 206

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 206

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product. 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.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

JUNE 6, 2016

Evangelos Simoudis’ is the founder and managing director of Synapse Partners. — Ashok has taken a Lean approach to innovation at Verizon: Within a couple of weeks of joining Verizon, they said, “Before you learn a lot about the company, write down what you think we should do.” Filed under: Customer Development.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Fractional CTO Analytics 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Or offer some real insights into our customers? It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” An in-depth reseller survey?

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 206

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.” This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 268

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 268

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 12, 2018

Lots of new box companies have trouble ironing out the kinks in their process: their customer can’t easily unsubscribe, their boxes just aren’t exciting or well-curated, and more. But if you’re writing a plan as an internal guide for strategic growth, you should consider a lighter version— a Lean Plan. Any of these can lead to failure.

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