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.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# Reply Lots of low cost experiments « Open Ambition , on April 22, 2009 at 8:58 am Said: [.] That’s why startups are agile.

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SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. I remember being immediately struck by how different we designed and built technology, versus how our customers did. 10) Leadership. 6) Process.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” I ran back to the company and said customers had told us, “We have to do both little and big endian.” And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The end result is often that change can happen but it is going to come at the cost of disruption and difficulty.”. The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The NGA has adopted Lean Innovation methods to make this happen.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2016

The end result is often that change can happen but it is going to come at the cost of disruption and difficulty.”. The good news for the country is that the leadership of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has decided to turn the ship now. The NGA has adopted Lean Innovation methods to make this happen.

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Lean Silicon Valley Government Acquisition 182

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 2, 2024

During his first meeting with the company’s global leadership, Truong made his case: “There’s no such thing as a mature market, there’s only mature business managers,” he asserted. “Of Creativity costs money and innovation drives value,” Truong explained. “The company saw North America as a mature market and didn’t expect any growth.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. No, not really.

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Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. For example, complex new semiconductor architectures, (i.e.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 162

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? what Market Type is your startup?

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Prior to founding Keen Home , Nayeem Hussain spent his career focusing on M&A, corporate development/strategy, and financial analysist, first at Prudential Financial and then at Loral Space & Communications. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

It will cost you your job.” his next article on SuperMac, “Building the Killer Team – Mission, Intent, and Values&# , Steve further pounds the table on some principles of leadership that I think are [.] But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. That kind of accountable.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

If you can harness the knowledge, natural enthusiasm, and peer influence of your very best customers — I call them “Rock Star” customers — they’ll market, sell, and help develop breakthrough products for your firm better than your internal resources can do, and often at a fraction of the cost.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Some are r esegmenting an existing market– directed at a niche that an incumbent isn’t satisfying (like Dell and Compaq when they were startups) or providing a low cost alternative to an existing supplier (like Southwest Airlines when it first started.)

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. Gorbachev, now the Soviet Premier, had to grapple with the spiraling cost of military systems that weren’t amortized by consumer purchases. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh).

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The discoveries in tube and circuit research suggested new electronic intelligence and countermeasure techniques and systems; in turn the needs of the Applied Lab pushed tube and circuit development.

Silicon Valley 155

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YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

Rather, they did these things because a) SAS software really was doing a terrific job, and b) getting the word out to their peers helped the customer champions build social capital. Your customers make better salespeople than you do, precisely because they don’t have any (obvious) skin in the game. Close the sale.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

corporation, and by extension Sloan laid the foundation for America’s economic leadership in the 20th century. Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) + The Customer Development… (Read more)+ Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

Silicon Valley 179

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers. Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. The German objective was to make strategic bombing too costly for the Allies to continue.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 203

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? We’re about to ship next week.”

Silicon Valley 206

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

She said, “Dad, one of the great things you and Mom did was never tell us how much things cost.” Now that I’m older, I’m starting to know what things cost. It was something I never thought about, and when I first heard it I thought it was a terrible thing to have taught her. For a minute it was a pretty depressing thought for a parent.

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Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

The first barrier to innovation is the Horizon 1 leadership conundrum. The same is true in most DOD/IC organizations: leadership has been promoted through the ranks for their ability to execute existing programs/missions. Horizon 3 organizations require Horizon 3 leadership (with Horizon 1 second in command.).

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that. However, for the Web 2.0

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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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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Of course, bringing startups (whether prospective or existing portfolio companies) closer to operating divisions has business and customer development benefits. Could they excel at customer development with enterprises? They are making substantial exits and are not just cost centers. Are they good sales people?

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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

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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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Without a budget, costs can quickly spiral out of control (last minute impulse purchases to jazz up your booth, for example) and defeat your best laid plans. A rule of thumb is that your space costs represent about a quarter of your total show budget. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. And we decided not to.

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Life Beyond Code

JULY 16, 2013

If there is a problem in real life, the pain of going through that problem has to be quantifiable else the switching costs will be super high. How do you know that the problem is real if you have never talked to the target customer? If the problem is simply manufactured in your head, the solution does not have to be built in real life.

Startup 151

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

They accomplished their goal, but at a huge, unanticipated cost: the processes and committees they designed ended up strangling innovation. It didn’t help that “innovation” was the new hot-button buzzword from senior leadership, and incubators were sprouting in every division of their company, it just made their job more unmanageable.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Prior to Worklife, Dave was a CEO coach, leadership trainer and culture consultant to some of Silicon Valley’s fastest-growing technology companies. Send an email to terri@kandsranch.com describing your entrepreneurial journey, Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.)

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Your results may vary.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America?

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