Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

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. They had an existing distribution channel and their dealers and customers thought they knew who the company was and what it stood for. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. Or blame my MarCom department who approved it.

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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.

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

I remember after a month or two of talking to 14-22 year old male gamers (our potential target market,) I realized that for the first time in my career I had no emotional connection to my customers or channel partners. There couldn’t have been a worse choice for CEO in Silicon Valley.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

And going for crowdfunding before you do customer discovery with customers can lock you into the wrong idea too early. These topics 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).

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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. End result? If they had done this, there would have been zero dollars in sales. .

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

The trap most of them fell into (common almost everywhere): they were reading the blog posts and advice of Silicon Valley-based companies and believing that it uniformly applied to them. But other critical hypotheses such as activities, resources, partners, channels needed testing offshore. It doesn’t. Born Global or Die Local.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential? We were constantly creating metrics [.] Thanks for sharing! Order Here. Now In Print!

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

Since we had gotten out of the software business when we came out of Chapter 11 , and our sales channel didn’t know what to do with software, we licensed ReelTime to Adobe. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. But you probably never heard of ReelTime. You may know it by its final name. Order Here.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2015

My guests this past week on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Pete Newell , managing partner of BMNT Partners. Matt Weingart, program development manager in the Strategic Development Office at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Reply steveblank , on May 22, 2009 at 2:39 pm Said: Morteza, The comments about “ignore this post&# were meant that if your sales channel is the web you rarely go to trade shows. You are correct all channels, web or otherwise, need to generate awareness and leads. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111. Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Want to be a guest on the show?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2014

Like all great Silicon Valley companies they started with a technology and guessed who the customers will be. The Customer Development process, this relentless drive to turn hypotheses into facts is what makes this learning so rapid. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111. Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Want to be a guest on the show?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2016

In Silicon Valley for three decades, spent eight years as a partner at US Venture Partners. My career pretty much mirrors Silicon Valley; because I always wanted to get on the next wave. I was always curious to find out what the next developments were. But coming to Silicon Valley is not nirvana.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

At Aster Data Systems, Ajeet and his team ran into challenges trying to transition their product to mainstream customers: We had a lot of success working with large web companies. Companies like MySpace and LinkedIn became some of our biggest customers. We tried to sell inside Silicon Valley, so these were all tech companies.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2016

At Aster Data Systems, Ajeet and his team ran into challenges trying to transition their product to mainstream customers: We had a lot of success working with large web companies. Companies like MySpace and LinkedIn became some of our biggest customers. We tried to sell inside Silicon Valley, so these were all tech companies.

Cofounder 274

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur EC2 274

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2016

In Silicon Valley for three decades, spent eight years as a partner at US Venture Partners. My career pretty much mirrors Silicon Valley; because I always wanted to get on the next wave. I was always curious to find out what the next developments were. But coming to Silicon Valley is not nirvana.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley California Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

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. Statistical and market research data plus potential customer interviews determine whether the ideas have merit. Marketing is at its peak.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture means that others will help when you’re starting up. Looking to create their accelerator/incubator, Wayne and seven other founders rented a Silicon Valley house together one summer. And a company culture and values need to be design and engineered just like the product. .

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

Andy came to Silicon Valley in 1983 to work for Regis McKenna and help Steve Jobs launch the Macintosh. Andy continued to work with Steve for several years and has developed marketing, branding and communication strategies for game-changing technologies and companies ever since. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 26, 2016

Introducing Hacking for Defense – Connecting Silicon Valley Innovation Culture and Mindset to the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. They don’t need an office in Silicon Valley to figure out what’s out there. Filed under: Customer Development , Science and Industrial Policy , Teaching.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2016

You can learn from your customers. He learned, too, that building a company outside a major startup ecosystem like Silicon Valley doesn’t have to limit a founder’s horizons: A lot of people, especially in the Midwest, will spend their time thinking too small. Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. Customer Development This strategy of starting on faith, and quickly turning them into facts is the core of the Customer Development process. Employ customer development.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

At Stanford, Ann Miura-Ko and I have been working on a simplified Silicon Valley version of this model. 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.

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Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Barrington Coffee – Fort Point Channel. Flour – Bakery and Coffee Shop in Fort Point Channel. Dan Allred – Silicon Valley Bank (@dgallred). Great for recent grads or career switchers.

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Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

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.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2016

You can learn from your customers. He learned, too, that building a company outside a major startup ecosystem like Silicon Valley doesn’t have to limit a founder’s horizons: A lot of people, especially in the Midwest, will spend their time thinking too small. Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Silicon Valley Entrepreneur San Francisco 120

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

She and her company, 1185 Design , has developed the brands of enterprise companies like Cisco, SAP, Sun Microsystems, VeriSign, Semens, Adobe; consumer products companies like Sears, Chiquita, Apple, Stanford Hospital & Clinics; and over 350 startups. Tune in Thursday at 1 pm PT, 4 pm ET on Sirius XM Channel 111. .

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Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2010

Students formed teams, came up with a business idea then talked to customers, vendors and sales channel partners to validate their business model. However, working full time while simultaneously attempting to participate in a team based project and Customer Discovery outside the classroom just didn’t work.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Me – “Have you used Company x’s product? Do you know have they distribute their product?

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