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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

—– Lean Innovation Management. In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. The result will be: a new, Lean version of the Three Horizons of Innovation. Here’s how.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum. We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The Lean LaunchPad Class. You may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Unfortunately, positioning our product as an "IM add-on" was a complete mistake.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. And Jennifer is now my co-instructor in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class.). The MVP Tree. The MVP Tree.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. However, four critical advances over the past decade (cloud, accelerators, Lean, and Angels) not only changed the math for tech investing but made regional tech clusters possible. Build $10-30M funds.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. OK, somehow we got them interested.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups. Waterfall Development.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

.” She looked at bit puzzled, so I continued to explain… One of the virtues of using the Business Model Canvas as part of a Lean Startup is that it helps you frame each one of your nine critical hypotheses. Filed under: Customer Development. Customer Development'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

Disruption today is more than just changes in technology, or channel, or competitors – it’s all of them, all at once. Once upon a time every great organization was a scrappy startup willing to take risks – new ideas, new methods, new customers, targets, and mission. Process Versus Product.

Government 315

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 315

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

Customer Development 219

Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

“My engineers say our website is old school, and we need to be on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, my VP of Sales says we’re wasting our marketing dollars not targeting the right people and my board keeps giving me their opinions of how we should describe our product and company. Who’s the user of product? with a strategy.

Marketing 310

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

Business plans presume that building a startup is a series of predictable steps requiring execution of a plan which assumes a series of known facts: known customers, known features, known pricing, known distribution channel. The reality is that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. I did both!).

Lean 433

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 433

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

We just finished the 6 th annual Lean LaunchPad class. For the last 6 years I’ve taught the Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford and Berkeley. business plans are fine for large companies where there is an existing market, existing product and existing customers, but they are useless in a startup where most often none of these are known.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards. So when he saw the browser it instantly dawned on him that this would be the greatest customer development tool ever. The Wedding Channel. Shopping.com. Insider Pages.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. Fundamentally, lean startups do more with less, because they systematically find and eliminate waste that slows down value creation. Not in my experience.

Lean 140

Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Value Proposition (their company’s product or service.) Many of them had heard the phrase “product/market fit” before, but now they were living it.

Customer 234

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 234

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

If you’re a technical startup founder, one of the painful lessons is that it’s not enough just to build a great product. You must also understand the value the product provides customers (along with the rest of your business model.). Her first startup, Pencil You In, grew from a personal need to schedule hair appointments.

Detroit 120

Detroit Baltimore Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

Today, the first half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. It’s hard to believe it’s only been a year since we taught the first 10 teams in the Stanford Lean LaunchPad class. We’ll teach over 175 NSF Innovation Corps teams in the Lean LaunchPad course in 2012. Here are the first five.

Lean 256

Lean Business Model Agile United States 256

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. Class lectures were over last week, but most teams kept up the mad rush to talk to even more customers and further refine their products. Others emphasize how to build a product. Syllabus is here. This is the End.

Lean 279

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 279

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Yet we hadn’t shipped a single product. All this activity occurring before we actually shipped a product. Believing Your Own BS is Toxic Lots of noise and smoke before a product ships seems to be a toxic byproduct of enthusiastic entrepreneurs. Which at this stage of the company was marketing and financing.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products for the Macintosh. They sold their product through the computer retail channel, something I knew nothing about. They sold to a set of customers I knew nothing about.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

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.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Nothing made any difference.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

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. End result?

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

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. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

The other departments in marketing gave the same answers; the product-marketing department said their job was to write data sheets. 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

Steve Blank

JANUARY 14, 2014

Surprisingly one of the “learnings” said that, “… the “big pivot” after starting with a different initial product is an outlier. Nearly 90 percent of companies are working on their original product vision. Since the Pivot is one of the core concepts of the Lean Startup I was puzzled. Could I be wrong?

Business Model 330

Business Model Lean Customer Development Channel 330

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. The Rise of the “Lean VC’s” – Consumer Internet Gets Funded. Lean VC’s are Different.

Lean 258

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 258

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Roominate , one of my favorite Lean LaunchPad teams came out to the ranch last week for a strategy session. The Roominate dollhouse building kits are being sold via their own website and soon, retail channels. As soon as they had designed the product, they found a contract manufacturer to build the product in China.

PR 314

PR China Lean Channel 314

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Others emphasize how to build a product. If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

Wiki 311

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 311

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Investors sitting through Incubator or Accelerator demo days have three metrics to judge fledgling startups – 1) great looking product demos, 2) compelling PowerPoint slides, and 3) a world-class team. A Lean Startup methodology offers entrepreneurs a framework to focus on what’s important: Business Model Discovery.

Oakland 326

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 326

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2013

It’s Lean, it’s fast, it works and it’s unlike anything else ever done. Welcome to the Lean LaunchPad for Life Sciences and Healthcare (part of the National Science Foundation I-Corps ). This post is part of our series on the Lean Startup in Life Science and Health Care. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences.

Lean 251

Lean Customer Development Business Model Channel 251

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile. The articles described the applications these users depended on and featured interviews with their most important customers. Cray Channels was describing my market, applications and customers for me.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147