Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 241

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (also borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals. Modern Corporation Marketing.

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Michigan Cofounder Stock Forecast 275

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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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 228

Berkonomics

JANUARY 3, 2013

Sometimes, products are designed to make all of their profit upon the recurring revenues from supplies or support. We immediately recall the razor and blade analogy to illustrate the point when planning product development and release.

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Revenue Software Review Vertical Valuation 79

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

As David Sacks from All in put it: On aggregate, a lot of funding was also deployed to startups in the application layer – investing in founders leveraging generative AI to either solve narrow tasks, or bring automation to tasks to reduce costs, increase accuracy, speed etc.

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Generative AI ChatGPT Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 78

ConversionXL

JANUARY 18, 2022

Product marketers own a variety of marketing responsibilities, which can be roughly divided into two broad categories: pre-launch and post-launch. During product development and before launch, product marketing responsibilities revolve around the GTM strategy, positioning, and developing messaging. Image Source.

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The Equity Kicker

SEPTEMBER 27, 2013

Jeff Richards of US VC fund GSV Capital has a good post up today: Content, Community and Commerce: Why Verticals Win. His investment thesis is that vertical platforms combining content, community and commerce will make great investments over the next period, and he cites existing portfolio companies including Houzz as good examples.

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eCommerce Community Silicon Valley Vertical 109

David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

In addition, I’ve noted a few multi-product lending firms, e.g., Kapitus and United Capital Source , which provide RBI as one of many structural options to companies seeking capital. . We have a special program if you are pre-seed and need product development. Repaid 12-36 months with ability to prepay at reduced cost.

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Revenue Technical Review Software Review Equity 60

Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

1x hacker in charge of product/development. 1x hipster working with both product and growth. Your customer acquisition cost and lifetime value are the two magical numbers you need to calculate for each one of your campaigns. Cost of Acquisition (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a user through a given channel.

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Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

Lightspeed Venture Partners

JANUARY 6, 2011

Our engineers often come up with great ideas, and they are the most productive when they work on these ideas. Shawn Gupta of OhLife , a personal journaling tool over email, has similar sentiments in using metrics to drive product innovation: Make metrics a core part of our product development.

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Stealth Startup Lean Cofounder 60

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

Most financial valuation formulas value an asset by discounting the asset using the cost of capital (interest rate) to the present day. This edge may come from deep knowledge of a vertical, discovering a loophole in the marketplace, or from possessing insights into the market that nobody else is privy to.

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Founder Valuation Dividend Startup 118

YoungUpstarts

JANUARY 7, 2013

Over the last 3 decades, IT has evolved from providing infrastructure and hardware to a more strategic role that is intimately woven with business verticals as shown below: - 1980s to 1990s: Servers, Storage, and Communications Infrastructure. Macro Trend 3: IT “Tuned” for Industry.

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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. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 139

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 139

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. This post describes such a model.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 246

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

He has a wealth of experience in the data vertical, having served in previous roles at companies such as Intel, AllScripts, and Vision.bi. In his 17-year career, Rosenberg has developed key insights into the minds of CFOs and FP&A teams, with strengths in both customer-facing leadership and data analytics itself. CEO Perspective.

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Hiring Software Review Customer 138

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. I’ve met a lot of gatekeepers in the past few months. Is that a lot? Is that good? ideas (e.g.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Austin Startup

NOVEMBER 30, 2017

In the earliest stages, these skills relate to what any good founding team should bring to the table — an acumen for business strategy and product development coupled with great engineering. The other restriction that startups should reckon with is the growing cost of talent.

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Early Stage Austin Silicon Valley Intellectual Property 48

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. Market Type also affects the market size as well as how you launch the product into the market.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

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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North Carolina Silicon Valley RSS Connecticut 146

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Very simply, your cost to acquire a customer needs to be lower than the value of that customer (lifetime value). As always, there are exceptions: if you build a viral consumer product (such as an Instagram) where people are just coming to your site / app in droves at no cost to you, then you’ve got a great business.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Very simply, your cost to acquire a customer needs to be lower than the value of that customer (lifetime value). As always, there are exceptions: if you build a viral consumer product (such as an Instagram) where people are just coming to your site / app in droves at no cost to you, then you’ve got a great business.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Austin Startup

MARCH 4, 2018

We’re at a strategic point where our core business is experiencing solid growth and we’re ready to invest in significantly more advanced breathomics sensing and analytics into our roadmap, so we can begin to focus on the specific disease verticals that our data, reach and technology can have the greatest impact for. I attended in 2007.

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San Francisco Startup China India 48

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

In times when venture capital is hard to get, investors extract high costs for failure (down-rounds, cram downs , new management teams, shut down the company.) Sales people cost money, and when they’re not bringing in revenue, their wandering in the woods is time consuming, cash-draining and demoralizing. Who recommends a sale?

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Anthony Ulwick and Ted Thayer of Strategyn have a set of unique and valuable insights: Rather than defining markets as existing, adjacent or new markets – or by verticals, technology, demographics, et al. Some innovators define markets around a product, e.g. the vacuum cleaner market or the espresso maker market.

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Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 421

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time? And in most situations, there is significant cost involved in negotiating over the right estimates to plug in. How much will it cost to solve this problem now? They are usually among the most heated arguments a company has.

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San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 23, 2019

.” Though, as another way to look at it, Nate Weiss (CTO of Conductrics ) says that the ‘skipping IT’ benefit of client-side tools could have a cost for some companies. Client-side tools let marketers run tests accurately without the help of developers. That’s not a small accomplishment.

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HTML Flash Mobile Web 58

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 23, 2019

.” Though, as another way to look at it, Nate Weiss (CTO of Conductrics ) says that the ‘skipping IT’ benefit of client-side tools could have a cost for some companies. Client-side tools let marketers run tests accurately without the help of developers. That’s not a small accomplishment.

HTML 50

HTML Flash Mobile Web 50

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 11, 2019

Easy does it: The right CRM can work magic, serving as a single platform that can span across the entire breadth of an organization — sharing information and providing value for customer service, sales, product development, management, operations and more. Time to Act With Analytics.

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Artificial Inteligence Sales Cycle Colorado Retention 127

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. the manager followed us still yelling. And that’s just to get started.

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 302

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

These poor miserable people who insist in making money at the cost of others, deserve our compassion, not emulation The real success I believe is leading a happy life and to hopefully provide for your worldly needs and those of your dependents. Being miserable in a big house is never better than being happy in a small one!

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

In this scheme, all of the data related to a specific feature of a product are stored on the same machines. For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. This type of vertical partitioning sharding scheme wont work in most cases. Key-based partitioning. to store it.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. Who’s on the Sharp End?

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 127

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 10, 2021

In this post, we’re sharing a build vs. buy framework to help you consider the opportunity costs and make an informed decision on whether to buy software off the shelf or build a custom solution. Market share: You may already be a category leader, and growth requires you to expand into new verticals. The scope of the project.

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Software Review Technical Review Software Acquisition 96