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. The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital.

China 216

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 216

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. Hiring VPs and execs with the right titles but the wrong skills leads to further trouble as high-powered sales and marketing people arrive on the payroll to execute the “plan.”

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring Channel Sales. “So They thought about it for a moment and said, “Well we feel like we understand how to build things, but sales is something we thought we’d hire an expert to do.”. Hiring PR Agencies.

PR 208

PR China Lean Channel 208

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. 1) Enterprise Sales.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

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

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. 5) Funding. 8) Organization.

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

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. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. There was no repeatable methodology, startups and their VC’s still operated like startups were simply a smaller version of a large company. Carpe Diem.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

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. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

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. Over the past few years, ff Venture Capital hired two full-time engineers to build out its internal technology stack, called Totem.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 18, 2008

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. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

For example, our goal could be: Create demand for our products and drive it into our sales channel. Create awareness of our company and brand for potential customers. In crafting your messages, remember that all messages operate in a context that may have an expiration date. Filed under: Customer Development , Marketing.

Marketing 312

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 312

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. Struggling to explain the successes and failures of those companies, I discussed principles like continuous deployment, customer development, and a hyper-accelerated form of agile.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

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 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

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

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

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

The goal was simple: validate demand or move on. These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Much like our digital PR offering, we started with a lean operation: We used Google Sheets to manage content operations across all accounts, along with dashboards that each client had access to. niche down”).

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Prior, he was a senior manager at Genentech in operations and project management. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Steven Cohn.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2016

Steven Cohn , founder and CEO of Validately , which helps user researchers, product managers and others validate demand or usability for prototypes and live sites. Prior, he was a senior manager at Genentech in operations and project management. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Steven Cohn.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder Seed Capital Texas 120

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. pay 'interest'). Eric, great post.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Spencer Fry

APRIL 17, 2017

Without raising money, 1 of 2 situations would have fallen upon us: I would have had to dig deeper into my own pockets to continue to pay the contractor as well as hire others. 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.

Bootstrapping 63

Bootstrapping Cap Table Liquidation Preference Cofounder 63

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

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 29, 2008 The ABCDEFs of conducting a technical interview I am incredibly proud of the people I have hired over the course of my career. This second objective plays no small part in allowing you to hire the best. Hiring decisions are among the most difficult, and the most critical.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

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. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Advertising 60

Advertising San Francisco Media Continuous Deployment 60

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

A founder typically recruits co-founders and then becomes part of the founding team involved in day-to-day company operations. If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee. In addition, the founding CEO thrives operating in chaos and uncertainty. Customer Development Family/Career/Culture'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

FYI the surveymonkey link isnt operational. 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. . November 19, 2008 5:57 PM McElroy Flavelle said. November 24, 2008 2:44 PM Eric said.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

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. . No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Lo, my 1032 subscribers, who are you?

Silicon Valley 68

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

If I have some budget for outside help, should I hire a vendor to help us drive down our payment fraud rates by 1% (ROI easy to predict), or hire a market research firm to give us insights into potential customers (ROI hard to predict)? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

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

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. If you can’t see the Agora slides above, click here.

Lean 281

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 281

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

MARCH 28, 2017

They would have to decide which beneficiary to focus on – the SEAL Team medical director, who was the sponsor of their problem, or the operators of the delivery vehicle and divers within SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One, along with their immediate chains of command in SDVT-1 and Naval Special Warfare Group 3. Now the team had a dilemma.

Lean 120

Lean Kansas Government Afghanistan 120

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program. 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 my experience, every marketer with an MBA wants to “do strategy.”

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 127

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business. Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I don’t know any developers.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

It takes advantage of the idea, which I owe to Clayton Christensen , that customers buying a product are really "hiring" it to do a specific "job" for them. Its as if every customer, whether they are an enterprise, a small business, or an individual consumer, is actually an employer who wants to get things done. Tough sell.

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

I have come to believe during my time as an operator, entrepreneur and investor that the balance of these skills is so important to the long-term health of a business that if balance is not achieved early then the impact later can be profound - sometimes terminal. 14 Comments • Nov 15, 2010 +1 for use of Platonic. and the latter on tech.

Technical Review 51

Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. on demand billing and fraud management. find/hire freelancers. hire low-cost international engineering talent. VWorker -Â find/hire freelancers. Customer Development. Codeacademy. Lean Methodology Sources. Steve Blank. SW Courses. Part 1- Intro.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53