Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Austin Startup

AUGUST 7, 2017

Sometimes it’s because the business grows market-by-market, like Favor, or sometimes it’s that the business needs to grow its sales or programming teams in multiple cities. More connections means more business, more investors, more revenue, and more growth. Texas exports more than California and New York combined.

Texas 97

Texas San Antonio Houston Dallas 97

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

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. would look in each of the verticals. For example, How does sales differ from one market to another?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

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 125

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales.

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Your goal was to preserve your cash while you turned these guesses into facts and searched for a repeatable and scalable sales model. A Progress Graph on the right visually shows how far you’ve come (in whatever units of goodness you’re tracking – revenue, units, users, etc.) Get back up and running.

Customer Development 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

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 entire discussion was streaming automatically into Twitter and gave us great visibility. MapWide.com.

Entrepreneur 116

Entrepreneur San Francisco Technical Review New Jersey 116

techcrunch.com

AUGUST 12, 2012

She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry. The top layer of applications and services that use the innovations of the first two layers to transform vertical markets (e.g, San Francisco, California.

Early Stage 70

Early Stage San Francisco Los Angeles Southern California 70

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. Some sales guy who was too busy to take the meeting was probably retired in Maui on the commissions. Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” 4) You don’t see any revenue gain past three years. 2) They don’t care about your profitibility and ultimately, your staying power.

Customer 195

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Growthink Blog

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

revenues from internet video services spanning user-generated content to television shows and movies will exceed $7 billion this year. What is the future for good-old fashioned DVD rentals and sales? He is a current member of the California State Bar, and the Hollywood Writers Guild. How about Internet Video? Annual U.S.

Los Angeles 85

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Technical Review Distribution 85

Growthink Blog

JUNE 19, 2010

revenues from internet video services spanning user-generated content to television shows and movies will exceed $7 billion this year. What is the future for good-old fashioned DVD rentals and sales? He is a current member of the California State Bar, and the Hollywood Writers Guild. How about Internet Video? Annual U.S.

Los Angeles 76

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Technical Review IP 76

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. 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.

Customer Development 215

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 11, 2009

I run a monthly meeting called the VCA that represents the majority of Southern California venture capital firms. Sales of avatars in social games nearly 50% of total revenue eclipsing revenue from affiliate transaction, ads or paid games (slide 97). Mobile game content revenue > PC game revenue (slide 98).

Asia 188

Asia Southern California China Japan 188

Start Up Blog

APRIL 29, 2013

The art of activating idle assets to bring in new revenue is occurring for both the service provider and the service creator. A local example was the Greenhouse pop up restaurant in Melbourne by Joost Baker – Which included vertical gardens and large amounts of material re-purposing. Cities are now becoming vertical again.

Uruguay 123

Uruguay Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 123

ReadWriteStart

MAY 12, 2011

Today, he has over a thousand, and he has chosen to focus on the realtor vertical. Then Taariq Lewis from San Francisco, California, presented Stanzr, a lightweight online events platform specifically focused on moving qualified leads generated through webinars towards a close. He is seeing excellent results. Following a guerrilla p.r.

San Francisco 125

San Francisco Entrepreneur Silicon Valley India 125

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

With that implicit assumption, startups hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies while marketing creates a brand and buzz to create demand and drive it into the sales channel (web, direct salesforce, etc.) Even more serious, startups can have radically different cash needs.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 126

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.&# (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Or simply wishful thinking?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

I took a deep breath and asked, “Ok, if you were, what percentage of your sales do you think these markets would be in 5 years?” “I guess less than 5%,” was the answer. Achieving consensus about every corner case from each stakeholder in the room is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do.

Silicon Valley 176

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 176

techcrunch.com

FEBRUARY 19, 2010

Similarly, the bulk of the companies getting funding are still California-based. After Northern California and Southern California the biggest area of investment geographically was in international companies. The cost of money is steep, and only works in certain verticals, of which software is NOT one. just my 2 cents.

Venture Capital 62

Venture Capital Technical Review Sweat Equity Valuation 62

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan. Marketing starts to build a sales demo, writes sales materials (presentations, data sheets), and hires a PR agency.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

Silicon Valley 156

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 156

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Some engineers were insulted that we were going to slow down their board and sales was convinced that within days of the board hitting the street we would have a black market in chips to speed up the $699 boards and turn them into $3,999 ones. Marketings job is to take engineering products and use them to maximize revenue and profit.

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 134

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Things Change In 1956 Hewlett Packard (HP) was a 17-year old company with $20 million in test equipment sales with 900 employees. I’ll show you the memo in a second. But first some background.) It was still a year away from its IPO. Its latest product was an oscilloscope, the HP 150a.

Silicon Valley 164

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 164

Reid Hoffman

SEPTEMBER 8, 2020

It might cater to new customers, it might solve a different need, or it might involve a different revenue model. This pivot fundamentally changes your required organizational competencies, from Sales and Marketing to Engineering, Operations, and Support. Our bounty system became a key part of their revenue model.

Startup 36

Startup Silicon Valley Business Model Mobile 36

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

If you are looking for short-term revenue or quick wins, you are better off skipping it (do something boring, but profitable, like Email or Affiliate marketing). Christmas was even better for Mobile (traffic, sales, store visits, everything). I'm so surprised that California is missing from the top 7.

Metrics 60

Metrics Analytics Non-Compete Search 60