Steve Blank

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Knowing your customers is the single biggest driver of startup success, and there’s no substitute for getting out of the building to learn about their problems and needs. Jason Young , co-founder of MindBlown Labs , which makes mobile social games to teach young adults about personal finance. And download any of the past shows here.).

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Colorado Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. Each new segment you attempt to serve can increase scope , adding to your workload and demanding more of your limited resources.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

They operated this way because their existing business models didn’t allow them to initially profit from those opportunities – so they ignored them – and continued to chase higher profitability in more-demanding segments. Therefore, for founders, entrepreneurship wasn’t a job, but a calling. Building better startups.

Lean 430

Lean Business Model Government Agile 430

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. The reality is that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. Cases and plans are useful for teaching managers of process, not founders. Its purpose was to educate management on best practices to run existing companies.

Lean 436

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

For the last few years, there really hasn’t been a demand to innovate on top of the ecosystem that’s been built. And some of their best and brightest have ended up in the organizations like the 2nd Bureau, Unit 61398 tasked euphemistically for “Computer Network Operations.”. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

China 326

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 326

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

There’s been a lot written about the individual characteristics of what makes a great founder , but a lot less about what makes a great founding team and how that’s different from a great founding CEO. In doing so we’ve failed to help founders understand what it takes to build a great founding team. Founders – the idea.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

For the last few years, there really hasn’t been a demand to innovate on top of the ecosystem that’s been built. And some of their best and brightest have ended up in the organizations like the 2nd Bureau, Unit 61398 tasked euphemistically for “Computer Network Operations.”. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital'

China 218

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 218

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” Well all the agencies we interview tell us they can survey our customers and come up with our positioning and then help us target the right blogs, influencers and press. Not to turn them into channel sales people but to hear customer objections unfiltered.

PR 318

PR China Lean Channel 318

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need. The “I know what features to build” flaw.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” Well all the agencies we interview tell us they can survey our customers and come up with our positioning and then help us target the right blogs, influencers and press. Not to turn them into channel sales people but to hear customer objections unfiltered.

PR 210

PR China Lean Channel 210

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Customer development. For those interested in getting started with agile or customer development, I thought Id include a few links. For customer development, start with Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany or take a look at his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lecture.

Lean 102

Lean San Francisco Agile Continuous Deployment 102

The Equity Kicker

FEBRUARY 25, 2014

Excitingly, if successful, SnapTrip will grow the market by matching demand for late availability deals with discounted supply. Turning to the business and how we’ve worked together, the first thing to say is that Matt’s customer development work was encouraging. Secondly, Matt was a sole founder when he joined us.

Stealth 141

Stealth Cofounder Aggregator Europe 141

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Hes a new employee, and he was not properly trained in TDD So far, this isnt much different from the kind of analysis any competent operations team would conduct for a site outage. For my first time, it was scalability problems and our operations team. why didnt operations get paged? How do you get started with five whys?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. What is customer development? Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

These diagrams are the visual representation of the how and the what a team learned in the class – how they tested their hypotheses by getting out of the building using the Customer Development process and what they learned about each part of their business model. is just another engineering process, not building a business.

Lean 284

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 284

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.) car market. Who was he?

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 175

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

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. Some companies and founders refuse to serve existing customers, and are always lurching from one great idea to the next.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. Signal is a fundraising tool for founders run by NFX Guild, which identifies the most relevant VCs for you. . Pitchbot.vc are using AngelMob.co

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups built every possible feature the founding team envisioned (using “Waterfall development,”) into a monolithic “release” of the product taking months or years to build a first product release. There was no repeatable methodology, startups and their VC’s still operated like startups were simply a smaller version of a large company.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Some questions have a natural escalation path (like working through the standard operations on a linked-list) and others require some more creativity. Any of these answers can work, and depending on what they choose, it usually makes sense to keep probing along these lines: which operations are the most expensive?

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Have you met that prickly operations guy who seems to love servers more than people (but would never let them fail on his watch)? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

LSC: Tell us about the customer development you did for your book: Alistair: We''ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders. As operators of an accelerator—and founders in our own right—Ben and I had constantly struggled with what the “right” numbers are for a business.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

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 203

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Ajay Kshatriya , co-founder and CEO of Biota Technology , which applies DNA sequencing technology to the energy industry. Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Steven Cohn.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Ajay Kshatriya , co-founder and CEO of Biota Technology , which applies DNA sequencing technology to the energy industry. Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Steven Cohn.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

As in many scalability decisions, we’d have been much better off investing in agility, so that we could change the architecture in response to actual customer demand, rather than trying to predict the future. Leverage product development with open source and third parties. path hence urgently pushing to release asap.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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 268

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 268

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Because of the extreme unknowns inherent in startup situations, we are all blind – to the realities of what customers what, market dynamics, and competitive threats. Periodic or on-demand reports are one possibility, but we can do much better. In order to use data effectively, we have to find ways to overcome this blindness.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

We were excited by the response at last year’s Lean Startup Conference to Diane Tavenner’s eye-opening talk on her experience implementing Lean Startup methods at Summit Public Schools, the California charter for which she is CEO and co-founder.

Lean 164

Lean New York City Startup San Francisco 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

As a consumer internet company with millions of customers, it may seem to have little relevancy for an enterprise software company with only a handful of potential customers, or a computer security company whose customers demand a rigorous audit before accepting a new release.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

Wed train them on-demand as they came in, and send them into the world (or onto the phones) with written instructions and voter contact data. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? What is customer development? Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online.

Campaign 84

Campaign San Francisco Lean Agile 84

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Find Questions, Topics and People Add Question Add Question Team Configuration 500 Startups Guerilla Marketing Organizations Entrepreneurship Startup Founders & Entrepreneurs Startups Startup Incubators and Seed Programs Seedcamp Y Combinator TechStars Lean Startups What is the perfect startup team? Lakshman Prasad • Nov 16, 2010.

Technical Review 51

Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

I would have continued to scrape by with a product that was conceptually on point, but didn’t have the bells and whistles that customers expect nowadays. What I worry about is the demand on every one of your potential customer’s attention and time. Competition is everywhere. Something has to give. Having great accountability.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

.” Hackernews list of “Tools of the Trade” for startups - includes over 150 SaaS tools used by startups, and over 150 comments with interesting insights from founders. Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. on demand billing and fraud management. Founders Institute Plain Preferred Term Sheet â??

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53