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. You take your product vision and get out of your building to turn your hypothesis into facts. would look in each of the verticals. New/Disruptive?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

According to MDG Advertising , 67% of online shoppers rated high-quality images as being “very important” to their purchase decision, which was slightly more than “product specific information,” “long descriptions,” and “reviews and ratings”: ( Image source ). Joann Peck and Suzanne B.

Stock 71

Stock Software Review Arizona Technical Review 71

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

And once you have a relationship with an author, musician, or journalist, it will be quite easy for them to offer new products and services – and for you to give them feedback that helps them shape ever more interesting (and ever more profitable) offerings. There are too many products clamoring for attention. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Never Get Even, Get Ahead With a set of orders from brand name customers, we had growing confidence that we had achieved product/market fit. We were within three months of formally announcing our company and products at a major industry trade show. making use of non disclosure agreement is both expensive and counter productive.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

If you’re building a startup, you’re likely to be in one of these two situations: Launching and selling a new product that nobody’s ever heard about, and probably don’t even know they need, or… Improving an existing product or service, which means that you’re going head on against someone with more traction, people, and money than you.

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

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. He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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. Cray Channels was describing my market, applications and customers for me. Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.]

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 14, 2014

According to MDG Advertising , 67% of online shoppers rated high quality images as being “very important” to their purchase decision, which was slightly more than “product specific information”, “long descriptions”, and “reviews & ratings”: Joann Peck & Suzanne B. image source.

Stock 129

Stock Software Review Lead Generation Arizona 129

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. I’ll stop channeling James Burke now. Who would have known? to do that.

Silicon Valley 270

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 270

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

The one or two product mangers who should have known better glanced down at their shoes. Now I was cognizant I might find a customers that hated the products or company. Were our products a small part of their life or large? What did they know about our products? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” If so, where?

Silicon Valley 185

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 23, 2011

Mike built a white label product that let large publishers leverage text based ads by building their own marketplace rather than using Ad Words. The second phase will be who can get the right combination lean back, lean forward, interaction, enhanced data, and make it fun. ESPN, Forbes, AOL were customers. 37:00-40:30).

Vertical 265

Vertical Curation Boston Burn Rate 265

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 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This week they were testing one of the most confusing sections of a company’s business model – Customer Relationships - the activities used to “Get, Keep and Grow” customers in a physical or virtual (web or mobile) channel.

Customer 247

Customer Cloud EC2 Channel 247

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Send PDF versions of brochures and product sheets as soon as you get back to the office. Have enough dead-tree brochures and product sheets on hand before the show so you can snail-mail out the information after you emailed it. Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.)

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. Over the years marketers have found that using numbers to compare yourself to other products works well.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

As we have seen with the recent speed bumps at highfliers like Groupon and Zynga, taking “lean startups” from foundation to creating sustainable, scalable, profitable business models is a very rare and special task. In founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer wanted to take his hard core engineering skills and apply them to vertical search in travel.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. How could it go wrong? Little did I know. Now he wanted to go off start his own company. We understood none of this.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

You’ll also learn how to apply growth marketing to five key channels and how to plan and execute experimentation. Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. Traditional marketers work to build awareness and emotional connections to product and brand. What is growth marketing? And what it isn’t).

Framework 102

Framework Marketing Acquisition Retention 102

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But here was a $499 product that could let everyone use video.) Even though we won’t make a ton of money, it will be an ambassador for the rest of our product family. If we’re smart we’ll cross-sell them one of our other products. There’s nothing to do with this product once you get the video in. Little did we know.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Lessons to Learn By the time I joined Ardent I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit. Reply My take on Customer Development and the Lean Startup | Recess Mobile Blog , on January 9, 2010 at 5:39 am Said: [.]

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 271

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Steve I have to tell you some bad news, I just showed our potential channel partners and customers a few completed pieces of the games we had. Tell them how great it’s going to be and see how many pre-orders we can get.” A month later the VP of Marketing appeared in my office again. They think the games stink.”

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 207

ConversionXL

AUGUST 21, 2015

Steve Jobs loved simplicity and his products reflected that. Our cognitive process leans towards understanding objects in their simplest form. In November 2014, Google published findings that suggest vertical ad units are the most viewable. Larger size helps users actually see the ad. Image Source. Image Source. Conclusion.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Software Review Vertical Advertising 48

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. What’s the best way to tell them about our product?… The person who can quickly re-channel that excitement to a different idea (one based on fact, not faith) will have much more success.

Silicon Valley 212

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 212

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

A tool like Quuu identifies relevant, shareable content to keep your social media channels active. . Automation allows you to spend less time on tedious tasks and will help boost productivity, especially within a small marketing team. They read reviews of the products of target investments.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

My two cents is that a business plan is the single place to collect your thinking about about your: business model, distribution channel, demand creation plan, financial assumptions, and customer and product development plan. Funny, but with their feedback, we changed several parts of the product.

Business Plan 140

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 140

justinmares.com

OCTOBER 8, 2012

If success is determined by how much you grow, your focus should be on more than just the product you’re building. In short, most startups are failing because they cannot hit their growth targets, and not because they fail to build a working product. Apply lean startup principles to getting traction. Use Quant-based marketing.

Vertical 44

Vertical Lean Channel PR 44

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 just need to persuade customers why their new product was better than the competition – and they did it brilliantly.

Customer Development 196

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 5, 2014

These new marketing channels mean CMOs command a growing share of their company’s investment in technology, and CIOs are none too happy about that. Masterful execution makes up one of the triangle’s two vertical sides. (I When you do, you’ll see that the contention is actually about much more than just money. Excuse the pun!)

Algorithm 174

Algorithm Analytics Social Media Metrics 174

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

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. These steps mesh seamlessly and support a startup’s ongoing product development activities.

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

Founder 297

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 297

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? Me – “How are you positioning your product?”

Silicon Valley 181

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 181

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. In previous companies I could talk about technology details and how the product features could solve a customers problem.

Silicon Valley 139

Silicon Valley RSS California Video 139

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc. 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 my experience, every marketer with an MBA wants to “do strategy.”

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 126

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Your company’s brand is a promise you make to customers and prospects about your products, your services, and your company. Branding is a process designed to develop, among other things, a unique business name and custom logo design for a company, product, or service. How they interact with your products or buy your services.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162

Occam's Razor

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

Let's move on to doing productive things. Other tools, can provide more dimensions including children, political leanings, ethnicity etc… You can see how this might be a lot more interesting for a magazine or content sites, and perhaps a lot less to other types of businesses. I did recommend not doing that, but go ahead.

Metrics 60

Metrics Analytics Non-Compete Search 60