Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. And that’s where the problem was. he’d declare. “We

Founder 316

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 316

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Without those open and yet expert-filled channels, it might have taken me many years more to correct my naivety and fill out my understanding of core topics.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

A business plan has a set of assumptions (who’s the customer, what’s the price, what’s the channel, what are the product features that matter, etc.) Yet by first customer ship most of the business model hasn’t been validated or tested. Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack.

Burn Rate 247

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 247

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2011

By now the nine teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad Class were formed, In the four days between team formation and this class session we tasked them to: Write down their initial hypotheses for the 9 components of their company’s business model (who are the customers? what’s the product? what distribution channel?

Business Model 236

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customer development?

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

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

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Mass blasts of information are ineffective, because the broadcast channels are suffering from information overload (even in social media). There are too many products clamoring for attention. Test-marketing is now easier than ever before, thanks to leveraged distribution channels like AdWords and Facebook. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 18, 2010

Recently, he was bitten by the lean startup bug and has started writing about his experiences attempting to apply lean startup and customer development principles. Managing weekly releases got a lot harder once I started doing customer development. Things started to slip. I am not advocating adding no features at all.

Continuous Deployment 151

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Wiki 151

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

I think this idea is particularly appealing to those of us from an engineering background. She has a separate team, with its own culture and office, and a mandate straight from top management to innovate without regard to the company’s historic products, channels, or supply chain. So far, so good.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. Those tools, combined with focused customer interviews, have turbo-charged the company’s ability to learn.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

, it seemed time to return to the subject of investigating who my customers are. Today, Id like to spend some time on two techniques: the problem presentation and learning what channels of information reach customers. But beyond the obvious, its also important to know where customers go to get answers to pressing questions.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

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 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Given that most recruiting channels are pay-for-performance, its usually cheaper, too, because it has a lower conversion rate. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

How do they become present on new social media and communications channels? How do they connect with a new generation of customers who had no brand loyalty? How to they use the new distribution channels competitors have adopted? Some of the teams even included some of their close partners.

Framework 389

Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 389

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

The App Store is a channel for customer acquisition. As the channel gets more and more crowded, just launching an app in the store is getting worse and worse as a strategy for each new entrant. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. Its like knowing the future.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

This model has not translated well to the world of social networking, because customers of social networks engage sites in a different way than customers of search engines. Those who have tried to build apps that exist just as glorified landing pages or marketing channels have generally failed.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Social Network Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

In other words, the service transforms tweets into professional reports that are sent by snail mail, fax, and email - the channels that actually have attention paid to them. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Founder DC Washington 150

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

September 2013 – Ryan Holiday publishes Growth Hacker Marketing and urges people to build growth into the product itself so that it’s a self-sustaining, scalable growth machine. An Epic List of 100 Growth Hacks for Startups by Search Engine Journal. Conducted Customer Development. …Really?

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009

g2s The very abbreviated version of Customer Development (channeling Steve Blank ). The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Boyds ideas have inspired a lot of the principles underlying my work. once it launches.

San Francisco 92

San Francisco DC Washington Lean 92

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 31, 2009

My overwhelming takeaway from the most recent Lessons Learned survey is that there is tremendous hunger out there for in-depth opportunities for entrepreneurs of all stripes to develop their lean startup skills. As you can tell from recent posts, Ive been experimenting with different formats and channels to try and find the best way to help.

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 31, 2009

Know someone whod make a great engineer at a startup? Maybe location-specific "channels"? I'm finding many people coming to me with jobs, not to offer to me necessarily, but to say, "hey do you know any good designer/engineer/product person looking for a new opportunity?" Function-specific?

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Startup Continuous Deployment 68

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In the tactics section, list your sales channels and describe how you will be selling your products. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. Another great way to test your idea is to create a minimum viable product, or MVP. Keep core development in-house.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

When it was spun out as a a separate company, Iridium’s 1990 business plan had assumptions about potential customers, their problems and the product needed to solve that problem. They made other assumptions about the type of sales channel, partnerships and revenue model they would need. It All Came Crashing Down.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

There are other models, in other distribution channels. After Ive built my first successful app, and all kinds of competitors have copied me and have similar apps right next to mine in the store, how will I continue to get new customers? How will new customers know that my apps are superior? Hey Eric, very interesting post.

Distribution 74

Distribution San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 74

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. You have your general management meeting and in your general management meeting you talk about product development, about marketing and about finance. All of these are about the product being badass. Edwin: I know. Jason: Yeah.

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Again, its critical to focus your marketing launch on those publications, venues, and channels that your potential partners are paying attention to. Do some Customer Development instead. So dont combine your product launch with a marketing launch. Instead, do your product launch first. Help you raise money.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In existing companies, the goal of traditional product management and marketing is to develop a market-requirements document (MRD) for engineering that contains the sum of all possible customer feature requests, prioritized in a collaborative effort among Product Management, Marketing, Sales and Engineering.

Customer 119

Customer Advisory Board Engineer Cofounder 119

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 24, 2009

This starts a downward spiral: as more and more apps become indistinguishable, they send out more and more notifications, which leads to increasing fatigue on the part of customers. As notification channels get stuffed full of these messages, customers tune them out (or platforms have to put in place dramatic limits on access).

Metrics 88

Metrics San Francisco Lean Viral 88

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. andrew chen great advice and really straight to the point – make a great product, focus on that and everything else will come. Sorry, folks.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

We were going to do that by turning marketing into a machine to generate end user demand, drive the that demand into our sales channels, and educate our sales channels. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 126

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

what are the most crucial steps to be taken by a new tech startup when outsourcing major part of the tech to IT firms or outsourcing “product development” eg new social media website project? Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. Then launch.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Because the book is chock-full of examples of how to do this in older industries, I will focus on my experience integrating NPS into an online service, although it should be noted that it works equally well if your primary contact with customers is through a different channel, such as the telephone. What is customer development?

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Wave after wave of hardware, software, biotech and cleantech products have emerged from what has become “ground zero” of entrepreneurial and startup culture. Compressing the Product Development Cycle. When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions users can happen in years versus decades.

Silicon Valley 335

Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

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 might mean competing with and if necessary killing your own products.

Restful 222

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 222

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

In fact, you cant go through traditional channels at all. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. ► May (3) Thank you Philosophy Helps Start-Ups Move Faster (WSJ on the. .

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89