Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Our first question was, did the total number of customers that had already bought products from our competitors and us represent a saturated market or the tip of the iceberg? Since I was heading a marketing department, not acting as an individual contributor, I needed to teach all of marketing the importance of customer data.

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 134

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

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.” They had an existing distribution channel and their dealers and customers thought they knew who the company was and what it stood for.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

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 300

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

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.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

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.

Vertical 128

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model.

Cofounder 219

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

SoCal CTO

MARCH 18, 2010

Our current focus is Actors and Actresses and we are moving into other verticals. What networking events in Los Angeles or Southern California do you go to? I also serve as CEO of a small media companies that profile “Tomorrow’s Most Exciting People Today”. Still it’s something that most managers need to learn how to do better.

Los Angeles 225

Los Angeles Revenue Southern California Social Network 225

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. California, where even the rabbits are bigger than life!

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 137

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 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

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. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.”

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 3, 2011

Today James Hickey from San Diego, California, pitched Parallel6 , a company that does social media marketing services for brands and also has a white label mobile app that can be customized and branded for their clients' mobile and social marketing needs. You can register here. Now, on to today's roundtable: Parallel6.

North Carolina 116

North Carolina San Diego Entrepreneur Balance Sheet 116

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. and “What did customers think of your prototype?”

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

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 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

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. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

Customer Development 212

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 212

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 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

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 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 27, 2011

It is also an excellent platform to address the questions from prospects and help clarify issues and objections for any sales process, which is one of the primary ways Voluble is seeing some of its major early customers using it. The next event will be on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, at 8:00 AM (PDT), register to attend here. MapWide.com.

Entrepreneur 116

Entrepreneur San Francisco Technical Review New Jersey 116

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Duct Tape Marketing

MAY 17, 2023

By cultivating genuine care for their customers, asking impactful questions, and showing empathy, they are able to establish meaningful connections with them. They're both longtime sales leaders, practitioners and professors of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business.

Sales 92

Sales Technical Review Minnesota Conversion 92

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 23, 2011

MyTab Next, Heddi Cundle from San Francisco, California, discussed MyTab , an online gift-registry of sorts to raise money for travel. The idea is interesting, but needs positioning and validation with the right set of target customers. I advised Anupam to come up with a 2011 strategy. He currently has a 1999 strategy.

Spain 115

Spain Entrepreneur India San Francisco 115

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2011

Second, to share how my how my thinking about entrepreneurship as a distinct practice and how Customer Development as one of its central components has evolved over the last decade. Fourth, as a public official in the State of California , to offer a window on how public policy on California Coastal protection gets made.

Silicon Valley 195

Silicon Valley California Vertical Customer Development 195

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter. It did not mean building a startup into a company to flip or hype on the market with no earnings or revenue, but building a company that had paying customers. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. People who aren’t current customers of our graphics boards will get to know our company and brand. All we had to do was tell customers they could get video into their computer – and not promise anything else.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. steve Customer Development is Hard. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. It starts at ~40:30 in the video. Order Here.

Customer Development 139

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 139

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? And we lost money when we did so.

Silicon Valley 141

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 141

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. A few successful ones do all these things.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

After a year and a half of running training and teaching the new Z-8000 and its peripheral chips, I began to figure out that one of the jobs of marketing was to translate what engineering built into a description that our salesmen could use to talk to potential customers. I also knew our customers.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Technology | Tagged: Customer Development , Tips for Startups « The Sharp End of the Stick Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions » 2 Responses links for 2009-05-06 « Blarney Fellow , on May 6, 2009 at 5:17 pm Said: [.]

Analytics 121

Analytics Silicon Valley Customer RSS 121

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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. Not All Startups Are Alike There’s an urban legend that Eskimos-Aleuts have more words to describe snow than other cultures.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

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?”

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part X: Stanford Crosses the Rubicon « Steve Blank Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The close tie between the two labs was a unique aspect of the Stanford Lab.

Silicon Valley 142

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 142

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

In 21 st century terminology we’d say that Terman built the Radio Research lab into a customer-centric organization doing agile development. My first business trip to the valley was to visit California Microwave. How was this possible? Had not yet heard of Silicon Valley at the time, but the siren call was already sounding.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180