Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

In all of these new product and cost-focused new trends, a big problem has emerged that all of these movements have not addressed. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? I care about the thought that you’ve given to the customer problem.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. Customer development (the understanding of customer needs) must be married to agile development (a process which drives waste out of product development).

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

The Rise of App Development in the Business World. In today’s technology-driven world, app development helps businesses deliver important information to their viewers and enhance the customer experience. That’s why app development has become more popular over the years. Out of the Box vs Custom Software.

Developer 107

Developer Offshore Software Developers Software Development 107

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Back then, an entrepreneur used a serial product development process that proceeded step-by-step with little if any customer feedback. The goal of Build-Measure-Learn is not to build a final product to ship or even to build a prototype of a product, but to maximize learning through incremental and iterative engineering.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. This wave of 1950′s/’60′s startups (Watkins-Johnson, Varian, Huggins Labs, MEC, Stewart Engineering, etc.) And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

Silicon Valley 294

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 294

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

A study done by SurveyMonkey and Search Engine Land found that brand name was the first thing people looked for when clicking on search engine results: Source. On places like Facebook, where the CPM (cost to reach 1,000) is the cheapest of any ad network ever: Source. Custom development. WordPress DIY.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

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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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 252

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. And they’ve absorbed and analyzed incredible amounts of information about their topic of concern.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. And they’ve absorbed and analyzed incredible amounts of information about their topic of concern.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

We were sitting in our conference room in our first “system-planning meeting” trying to define the specifications of our new supercomputer and make the trade-offs between what was possible to build, and what customers in this new market would actually want and need. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

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Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 282

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

Or were they 2) an information exchange, providing matching services for cloud computing buyers and sellers, providing matching services. Veritas , was the team building a low cost, residential wind turbine that average homeowners could afford. by modeling wind speed, energy costs, homeownership density and green energy incentives.

Customer 239

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 239

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. Cost-based Pricing versus Value-based Pricing.

Customer 326

Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 326

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2013

(Drones were better than satellites because of higher resolution and the potential for making more passes over the fields, and better than airplanes because of lower cost.). Smart team, real domain experts in hyper-spectral imaging, drone design, good start on customer discovery, beginning to think about product/market fit, etc.

Product 335

Product Customer Development Forecast Engineer 335

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Lean 334

Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 334

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 24, 2020

If you don’t have customers, our articles on customer development and how to write compelling copy without customers can help you get started. It got attention (and probably some clicks), but at what cost? It can impact the entire customer lifecycle. But it also costs double to get those conversions.

Acquisition 111

Acquisition Software Review PPC Analytics 111

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.

Customer 418

Customer Business Model Restful Video 418

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office. Stay hungry, stay lean.

Silicon Valley 226

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 226

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

I suggested that to validate their minimum viable product it would be much cheaper to rent a camera and plane or helicopter, and fly over the farmers field, hand process the data and see if that’s the information farmers would pay for. All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost.

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Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 320

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

If we showed the Toyota Production System to an Internet protocol engineer, it is likely that he would remark, "That is a tail-dropping FIFO queue. For example, heres him discussing our collective blindness to queues: To understand the economic cost of queues, product developers must be able to answer two questions.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

The combination of the Business Model Canvas, Customer Development and Agile Engineering is an extremely efficient template for the students to follow. It drives a hyper-accelerated learning process which leads the students to a “information dense, evidence-based” set of conclusions.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections.

Silicon Valley 190

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 190

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

I was an engineer on the engineering team. For one, the engineers consider the artists stupid; the artists consider the engineers arrogant. The engineering team would then build that feature, mimicking the UI as close as they could using the current primitives supported by the system. The meeting was tense.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

customer development. agile engineering. Some general customer development slides click here. Called “ How to Build a Startup: The Lean LaunchPad ,” it walks you through the Business Model Canvas and an overview of the customer development process. Click here for more information. Find it here.

Open Source 335

Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh). I mean, have you seen other people? Heres my take.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Local MVP (most valuable professional) customers are critical in helping Microsoft penetrate foreign markets affordably and effectively, providing the firm its most effective marketing communications and saving it hundreds of millions of dollars in support costs.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 199

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 199

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? Trying to answer that question at IMVU led me to discover Google AdWords and the world of search engine marketing. SEM is a simple idea.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

The Navy informs Terman that, “money was not a problem but time was.” Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The university found government contracts profitable as the government reimbursed their overhead charges (their indirect costs.)

Silicon Valley 152

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 152

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 424

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

If you believed the opinions in the marketing department, the customers were in science, engineering, color desktop publishing, and a variety of applications with no single industry or application dominating the list. Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? The obvious one’s were who were they?

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 206

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

When a customer tells you how they feel about your ideas, that doesnt tell you anything about your ideas. It tells you something about what that customer thinks and feels. Figuring out whether and how to incorporate that new information into your vision is your job. As Steve says, "That’s what we get paid to do."

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Other weeks Yuri would be buffeted by the realities of his burn rate, declining bank account and depressing comments from customers. he’d declare. “We

Founder 320

Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 320

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. In Apple’s case Burrell Smith was designing a computer in a skunk works unbeknownst to the rest of Apple’s engineering.

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 140

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future. The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. We can choose to continue paying the interest, or we can pay down the principal by refactoring the quick and dirty design into the better design.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

All of Intel’s resources – fabs, manufacturing strategies, and most importantly executive mindset — were geared towards large, expensive x86 processors, not low-cost mobile cores of someone else’s design. In contrast, startups operate with speed and urgency, making decisions with incomplete information.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

This approach is a the heart of breaking down the "time/quality/cost pick two" paradox , because these small investments cause the team to go faster over time. Its why, at my previous job, we were able to get a new engineer completely productive on their first day. Most engineers would ship code to production on their first day.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167