Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

Agile development has upended the familiar consumer expectations and company revenue models designed around the release cycles of Waterfall engineering. Companies can deliver product improvements via the cloud so that all customers get a better product over time. Continuous Delivery/Deployment – The Marketers View.

Continuous Deployment 331

Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 331

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. It’s not just about a logo or a tagline; it’s the experience you promise your customers.

Intellectual Property 135

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 135

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue. the Customer Life Time (CLT)).

Customer 327

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 327

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

Finally to have a better chance of a viable enterprise, they need to test all the other hypotheses in their business/mission model (pricing, demand creation, revenue, costs, etc.). The key principles of customer development are: There are no facts inside the building so get the heck outside.

Customer 419

Customer Business Model Restful Video 419

Both Sides of the Table

FEBRUARY 7, 2010

My first company launched in 1999 and we were offering a SaaS document management in the cloud (we were called ASPs back then). We made lots of assertions about what features we thought people would want, how to price them and how to overcome the objections that people have to managing data in the cloud.

San Diego 267

San Diego Entrepreneur Philadelphia Cloud 267

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

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2012

from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. 2006 - broadcasters sued Cablevision (and lost) to prevent the launch of a cloud-based DVR to its customers. Where did the other $57 billion come from? The reality?

Silicon Valley 336

Silicon Valley Distribution Washington Channel 336

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 27, 2014

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. With a little help from a friend, you can handle expenses, revenue, and payroll, with QuickBooks or a similar package.

Entrepreneur 260

Entrepreneur Burn Rate Social Media LLC 260

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. Agora Cloud Services. How do we get past Amazon as the default cloud computing service provider?

Cloud 237

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 237

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

is an elegant way to model any service-oriented business: Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue We used a very similar scheme at IMVU, although we werent lucky enough to have started with this framework, and so had to derive a lot of it ourselves via trial and error. The AARRR model (hence pirates, get it?)

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2010

The company had innovated, found a business model, grown successfully but now even as revenues continued to grow, the company was slowly but surely dying. As the revenues grew, engineering continued to pursue sustaining innovations - incremental improvements on its core technologies. It was impressive.

Silicon Valley 273

Silicon Valley Cofounder Acquisition Kansas 273

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Intel under their last two CEOs delivered more revenue and profit than any ever before. Their most profitable segment is very high-end processors used in data centers in servers and the cloud. Filed under: Corporate Innovation , Customer Development. They knew how to execute the current business model.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Storm Clouds - A VC : Venture Capital and Technology , November 12, 2010 We have enjoyed an amazing run in the web startup and investing space over the past five or six years. Today, brands are hiring social media specialists for customer support, crowdsourced product development, promotions and even leads generation.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works. What resonates with customers?

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. A VC asked me to have lunch with the CEO of a startup building cloud-based enterprise software. The board was getting nervous as the company was missing its revenue plan. Boy did I feel like Rip Van Winkle.)

Forecast 276

Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 276

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Slowly, over time, we optimized (or eliminated) each step in the process of becoming a customer by giving us money. And one day a remarkable thing happened: we started making more than five dollars a day in revenue. Only much later did I realize that this was an application of customer development to online marketing.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

Last week the teams tested their Revenue Models hypotheses: what are customers willing to pay for? Partners are the external companies whose product or service combines with your Value Proposition to create a complete customer solution or “whole product&# to satisfy customers. Week 8 of the class. Veritas turbines.

South Dakota 232

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 232

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 15, 2010

Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. Usually, they are delivering only a fraction of the revenue they promised. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Lets return to our team thats failing to hit their targets.

Hockey Stick 105

Hockey Stick San Francisco Entrepreneur Lean 105

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Since the term “cloud computing” was coined in 1996—at least as we have come to understand its meaning—the software as a service industry has exploded. 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.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

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

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. What is customer development?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. It turned out that, during the course of the decline, one customer segment was losing customers while another was gaining customers. The company struggled mightily with how to explain this bad news to their board.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 9, 2018

For revenue streams figure out who’s going to pay. To indicate where their customers for this new market would come from they drew the 5 adjacent market segments they believed their future customers were in today: corporate, higher education, startup ecosystem, institutions, and adult learning. Understand Who Pays. An insurer?

Marketing 325

Marketing Startup Government SEC 325

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Customer Development : a disciplined approach to finding out if there is a market for your product before its too late.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 10, 2015

Customer development work [I’ve written about this before ]. Although there is an obvious question about the revenue potential for a one-time-use product.). This ‘custom solutions’ analogue was important when we decided to invest in Dataloop last year. Hunt for analogues [more on this in a second].

Open Source 60

Open Source Customer Development Cloud Software 60

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Should you charge from day one, testing the revenue model first? For more on how to figure out which question applies in which context, see Business ecology and the four customer currencies.) And therein lies the most common source of confusion about whether startups should listen to customers.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

As Ive argued elsewhere , my belief is that startups (and anyone else trying to find an unknown solution to an unknown problem ) have to measure progress with validated learning about customers. In a lot of cases, thats just a fancy name for revenue or profit, but not always. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

We’ve seen some modest progress in people upgrading from Excel to Google Sheets; use of some CRM; and a cloud-based storage service. VCs tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most are using the same infrastructure tools they have used for the past 20+ years: Excel and recent college grads searching Google.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

If you can start getting ROI on a feature in month one of a twelve month project versus waiting until the end, youve comparatively reduced the cost of development by the revenue generated by that feature over 11 months. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Not even if its generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. Not everything has to follow lean startup and customer development principles, and I write that as a devoted practitioner of both.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 28, 2008

In fact, in the early days, when IMVU would experience unexpected surges of revenue or traffic, it was inevitable that every person in the company was convinced that their project was responsible. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Seth Godin: How often should you publish?

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008

Either way, you would have been better off focusing your split-test on high level metrics that measure how much customers like your product as a whole. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

There are a whole range of valid reasons why non-developers would want to dictate the production release schedule (Seasonal/timing issues, marketing, fulfillment concerns, documentation/training, revenue controls, legal/regulatory. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167