Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 212

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. Now everyone can do design,” was the mantra. George Bernard Shaw. Not everyone is an artist.

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Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? What the winners start with is the realization that in a world of continuous disruption, they have only a few years to develop new capabilities or be pushed over the brink. Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter? The short answer is no.

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Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 402

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Finally, I’ll write about 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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. steve Customer Development is Hard. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. It starts at ~40:30 in the video.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 139

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. As a result, the standard product development model is not only useless, it is dangerous.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

However, there’s a growing belief that the “design preferences” of Chinese consumers are just bad design. TenCents WeChat , (designed for an international market) is the first incredibly popular app in China to dramatically raise the bar for what a good user interface and user experience looks and feels like.

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China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

SVPG

MARCH 17, 2011

Your company needs the strongest product team possible, and if you don’t develop your team and provide growth opportunities, there are other companies that will. ” This note discusses the technique that I use and advocate for providing a framework for ongoing skills assessment and development. his ability).

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Developer Product Technical Review SCRUM 67

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

However, there’s a growing belief that the “design preferences” of Chinese consumers are just bad design. TenCents WeChat , (designed for an international market) is the first incredibly popular app in China to dramatically raise the bar for what a good user interface and user experience looks and feels like.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

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.” Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

We hired a PhD in computational fluid dynamics from Duke who had worked on helicopter design. Reply Fred H Schlegel , on October 20, 2009 at 1:20 pm Said: I believe the MBA was originally developed with the idea of helping functional experts move more smoothly into upper management ranks.

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Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 198

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

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.&# Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. In a startup it doesn’t matter if you’re 100% right 100% of the time. Blog at WordPress.com.

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 300

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I began to gain an appreciation of how world-class venture capitalists develop pattern recognition for these common types of problems. “Oh Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

Steve Blank

APRIL 28, 2014

The curriculum draws from Philadelphia University’s design, engineering, and business disciplines, as all are needed to make innovation relevant in the government. The program is built around five core innovation practices that we teach: Integrated Design Processes – The process of opportunity finding, innovation and problem solving.

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Government Philadelphia Lean Customer Development 301

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

After talking to its resellers and customers I realized that SuperMac was the only company that could be described as “fifth in a group of three.” The assets were a series of products already developed and on the market or in the development pipeline. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Blog at WordPress.com.

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Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Venture Capitalists on your board developed the expertise to get your firm public as soon as possible using whatever it took including hype, spin, expand, and grab market share because the sooner you got your billion dollar market cap, the sooner the VC firm could sell their shares and distribute their profits. tags: vc entrepreneurship) [.]

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

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.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. » Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place. , carry on reading.

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

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. 4) Staffing. 7) Silos.

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Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

New strategic direction in companies with loyal customers have different consequences then when you had no customers Acquiring new customers are a lot more expensive that converting existing ones. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Blog at WordPress.com.

Customer 195

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 195

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Good stuff too.

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

We four instructors would grumble and complain to one another about our lack of leadership. I had been teaching Z8000 design to customers for the last year and a half. I also knew our customers. I understand how our products were being used and why we won design-in’s over Intel or Motorola.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “ The old paradigm works like this: Your company produces goods and services that help customers get a job done. In return, the customers pay you money. Close the sale. Understand buyer needs.

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Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. Our friends who run the state park surrounding our ranch will join all of us for Thanksgiving dinner. Just a reflection on my family and hopes for our children.

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 137

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. The software was idiot proof. It was fun watching it happen.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 17, 2015

All the culture and incentives are designed for execution. According to Takashi Tsutsumi and Masato Iino, Japanese companies tend to be technology centric, obsess over quality and have weak leadership. Technology centric leads to companies ignoring their customers and the challenge is that they don’t do customer interviews.

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Lean Japan Startup Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Market Risk vs. Invention Risk - Click to Enlarge For companies building web-based products, product development may be difficult, but with enough time and iteration engineering will eventually converge on a solution and ship a functional product - i t’s engineering, not invention. In these markets it’s all about invention risk.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 144

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf. From grumbling skeptics, they all became packaging design converts. And for sure they were never going to win any design awards. So we not only sent everyone through packaging school, we also brought the packaging design in-house.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

We talked about some simple design rules and I remember him thanking me for coming, saying we were the only chip company who cared enough to call on him (little did he know.) Long gone from Zilog I saw the picture of the original Macintosh design team. I thought nothing about the meeting until years later.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

the “schedule fantasy factor,”) or his eleven rules of supercomputer design but also a real appreciation for how a technical visionary thinks. (I Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I would learn a ton from Gordon for over a decade, not only about practical heuristics for managing complex engineering projects (i.e.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

There is a wealth of resources that are unique to this town and a vibrant community of hackers, product designers, business people, and investors at various stages in their career. This guide is designed to help you hit the ground running and is a starting point for your entrepreneurial journey in Boston. Next major event?

Boston 71

Boston Technical Review Community Cofounder 71

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

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 [.] Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. I was impressed with the fact that he understood that.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. A-12 OXCART CIA Spyplane ESL found other ways to stay very close to its customers. could design and produce, and a good part of it was coming from Silicon Valley.

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Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171