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.

Vertical 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. I couldn’t care less about those. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.

Silicon Valley 267

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 267

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

They realized if they could develop and promote a well-coordinated sports technologies industry, they could capture their unfair share of the $300 billon sports consumer market. Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry. while building their products in China.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. The Potrero benchmark strategy was one component of this creating end user demand through PR.)

Silicon Valley 125

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 125

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.

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 137

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Your design or ad agencies can impress you with their awards, but if you’re not moving product or creating demand, you’ve missed the point.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Write it down and keep it in a tradeshow handbook for those who will follow.

Silicon Valley 132

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 132

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. Customer Development This strategy of starting on faith, and quickly turning them into facts is the core of the Customer Development process. Employ customer development.

Silicon Valley 228

Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 228

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. Is that a lot?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Some of the conversations went like this: Startup 1 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and have been following the Customer Development process and I’ve talked to lots of customers.” Do you know how they create demand? Do you know the archetype of their customers? This is easy to test.

Silicon Valley 197

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 197

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 267

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 267

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

produced this analysis of engineering representation within VC firms: Selected VCs with Highest Representation of Developers in Workforce. HOF Capital is currently developing a proprietary sourcing tool to automatically filter for potential deal prospects that fit our criteria. The VC Software Stack — the Untouched Vertical.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

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.

Lean 257

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 257

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

The idea was to keep customers coming back to General Motors over time to upgrade to a better brand as they became wealthier. Finally, GM created the notion of perpetual demand within brands by continually obsoleting their own products yearly with new models rolled out every year. Think of the iPod family and its yearly new models.)

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 170

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Cray called two years ago and bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one. Reply BillSeitz , on November 23, 2009 at 4:51 am Said: Did you put your pinky next to the corner of your mouth and demand “1 beellion dollars&# ? Story here. [.]

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 201

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If the VP of Sales doesn’t think that generating end user awareness and ultimately demand for them is worthwhile, then one of you is an idiot. Hope it’s not you. Once you know which show you’re going to and what your goals are, draw up a budget. Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

Silicon Valley 194

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 194

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

The goal was simple: validate demand or move on. Conduct client development interviews. Interviewing your customers can reveal the priorities they’re aware of. Relying on client development alone will give you only part of the picture. Choose to expand vertically or horizontally. Image source ).

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

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.

Venture Capital 228

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 228

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Our VP of Business Development had no problems getting meetings and fund raising was easy. Not being able to hear negative customer input is an extremely bad idea. Out of the Ashes A few of the key tenets of Customer Development , came from the ashes. Which at this stage of the company was marketing and financing.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

I wanted to know if marketing was getting any bang-for-the-buck in spending its demand creation dollars. I wanted to understand how customers bought our products. That’s a mouthful to say that our sales people didn’t sell our products directly to a customer. Which ones? Had they seen any our ads? Did they understand them?

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 201

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? We need our team members to have sustainable work / life balance or risk losing them to another less demanding industry all together. The Adventure of a Lifetime.

Entrepreneur 289

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 289

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. If you’re text averse like i am, try to diagram these key items and then write-up the diagrams.

Business Plan 148

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 148

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It could be fixed by refactoring the code itself, or by partitioning the data horizontally or vertically, or by adding additional capacity at the point of the bottleneck, or by shaping end-user demand, or even by removing the feature itself. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

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 an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development.

Silicon Valley 129

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 129

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110