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 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

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. After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. End result?

Customer Development 220

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

I''ve been thinking a lot lately about scaling sales. . Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. How do I build a repeatable, scalable sales process that is like an industrial machine - not a crafts project? 1) Enterprise Sales.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

SoCal CTO

FEBRUARY 2, 2011

There's a lot out there around Customer Development - read Steve Blank : Entrepreneurship as a Science – The Business Model/Customer Development Stack - Steve Blank , October 25, 2010 Checklists for Chaos, The Path to Success - Steve Blank , October 28, 2010 and reading about Lean, MVPs, etc. is a requirement.

Valuation 198

Valuation Revenue Pre-Money Valuation Early Stage 198

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Startup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Here’s an example in a direct sales channel. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. The board was getting nervous as the company was missing its revenue plan. Sales Process.

Forecast 276

Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 276

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

How can we attract buyers to our channel before they make purchasing decisions? Sales process: buyer/ user/ influencer etc.? The Agora team decided to formalize the customer discovery process by coming up with a set of Customer Discovery principles and questions that were as good as any I’ve seen. Demand generation?

Customer 240

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 240

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Then, consider how you’ll reach your customers and what kind of relationship you want to build with them. Revenue streams are another critical component of your business model. Will you opt for direct sales, subscriptions, or a freemium model? Decide on your pricing strategy and how you’ll generate income.

Intellectual Property 153

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 153

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

I’ll publish the final post in this series this week and then move on to my next series – sales & marketing. I’ll be covering my PUCCKA sales methodology. The exact same team had worked on 2 previous customer service startups (and 1 non-CS product). It will be controversial – I know.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

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

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption. Notice that the traditional product introduction model leads to a product launch and the execution of a revenue plan. Albert Einstein. Ritualized Crises.

Burn Rate 251

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 251

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. But other critical hypotheses such as activities, resources, partners, channels needed testing offshore. sales office. Trip 2 to the U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Our revenue model was wrong. We were charging a really high up-front annual fee to these providers and the end result of that was a pretty long sales cycle. We tested the new strategy with several customers in the pipeline and it took our sales cycle from about 60 days to 1 week. Want to be a guest on the show?

Cofounder 145

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 145

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Our revenue model was wrong. We were charging a really high up-front annual fee to these providers and the end result of that was a pretty long sales cycle. We tested the new strategy with several customers in the pipeline and it took our sales cycle from about 60 days to 1 week. Want to be a guest on the show?

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

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. are what make it a business, 2) business plans are fine for large companies where there is an existing market, existing product and existing customers.

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups. What Does this Mean?

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination. Yet year after year, decade after decade, VC’s would watch as no startup business plan survived first contact with customers. The International Business Model Competition.

Business Model 267

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 267

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue? Unlike an org chart, which describes how a company executes to deliver known products to known customers, the business model canvas illustrates the search for the unknowns that most new ventures face.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

These new entrants disrupted their food categories by offering high quality proprietary recipes, outsourcing their manufacturing, and using their cash and resources on sales and marketing to build distribution and a differentiated brand. And not just any customer; it was from one of the largest supermarket chains in the U.S.

North America 120

North America Lean Customer Development Distribution 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I had been confused for years why I had to update an income statement each board meeting that said zero for 18 months before we had any revenue. As a founder you are testing a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? What’s the distribution channel? Customer Acquisition.

Balance Sheet 304

Balance Sheet Startup Burn Rate Metrics 304

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

As a founder you start out with: 1) a vision of a product with a set of features, 2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? What’s the distribution channel. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. When revenue, users, traffic, etc.,

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

If this is your attitude, your conception of tech support is completely backwards and you're missing out on important channels for marketing, product development, and sales. Tech support is sales. At Smart Bear we made millions of dollars in both individual and enterprise sales without "sales.".

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

ConversionXL

JANUARY 31, 2014

note: If you’re a startup, you’ll want to use customer development questions for your page to resonate with future traffic). How To Identify Your Target Market & Make More Sales. Do This: Use customer development techniques found in this post to build a profile of your ideal buyer personas.

Analytics 134

Analytics Video Matching Conversion 134

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. The survey said in part: The survey has 57 questions, the last three of which are open ended, and should take about 20 minutes to complete. “We’re a web startup, all our customers are on the web.

Metrics 242

Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 242

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

By 1992 Research in Motion (RIM) had been in business for eight years, had 16 employees, sales of about $500,000 a year, and three or four business lines. In today’s language of Customer Development , RIM positioned the Blackberry as a segment of an existing market – pager users who needed two-way communication.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 276

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom and test the first key hypotheses of their business model: The Value Proposition. What sort of sales structure and salesforce does it require? This post is part three. Syllabus is here.

Cloud 237

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 237

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

They’ve found product/market fit (what products customers want to buy). They’ve learned the best distribution channel to get the product from their company to the customer. They’ve figured out the revenue model (subscription, license, direct sale, etc.) and how to price the product.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Most of the social and mobile channels (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Android) have emerged in just the past 3-5 years. It’s because the startups are doing something very new that make them “Lean&# : These startups embrace customer and agile development that Eric Ries has been evangelizing.

Lean 263

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 263

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

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 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them. Lets see why.

Lean 260

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260

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). Test-marketing is now easier than ever before, thanks to leveraged distribution channels like AdWords and Facebook. What is the right revenue model? Is that a lot? Is that good?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 15, 2017

by Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of “ The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue “ The fastest growing businesses today have a powerful secret weapon: superusers. This special group of customers goes far beyond using your services regularly and paying promptly.

Community 124

Community LLC Customer Developer 124

The Startup Toolkit

NOVEMBER 15, 2012

Some businesses have basically zero risk around their revenue model. Or, in canvas terms, channel plus relationship. If you are a sales-driven company, this is where you figure out your roadmap. You shift from qualitative feedback (customer development) to quantitative feedback (metrics).

Startup 55

Startup Business Model Retention Acquisition 55

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. In the tactics section, list your sales channels and describe how you will be selling your products. The Recommended Sales Forecasting Method.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74