Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Startups could now get a first version of a product out to customers in weeks/months rather than months/years. For a specific startup this list is probably a few hundred names.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. Thanks to Suns amazing PR blitz, there was tremendous demand for experts on Java, and I did my best to convince people that I was one of that mythical breed.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

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 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

The extreme example of this are algorithmic investors in the public markets, who design algorithms which trade on the designer’s behalf, as opposed to making trading decisions directly. Many tools designed for B2B marketing in general are also relevant to investors. 1) Market fund.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

And so, the concept for a digital PR service was born. Using my existing skills and resources (including an old domain name), I tested a productized digital PR offer. About 18 months later, we pivoted our messaging to evolve beyond digital PR. Conduct client development interviews. Image source ).

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Is this behavior an outlier or is it the norm in the PR industry? Keep them coming Reply William , on August 24, 2009 at 12:00 pm Said: I doubt this is TechCrunch’s first encounter with PR people lying.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 210

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

The Message Sitting around a conference room table brainstorming messages that might resonate with customers, or worse having a PR agency doing that for you, is a firing offense in a small company. You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers. IBM doesn’t have to shout to get noticed, but you do.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. If you drop the sentimentality, a company is a merely a brand-name for a historical context. And brand-names are ultimately are just commodities that can be bought and sold (e.g., Agilent is a $5.8 billion dollar test and measurement company.

Silicon Valley 186

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 186

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Air Force’s long range bombing arm and the designated instrument of Armageddon. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the defense of the Soviet Motherland lay with the Soviet Air Defense Forces , called PVO Strany , a separate branch of the Soviet military formed in 1948 designed to detect U.S. bombers. (The Details in the next post.

Silicon Valley 173

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 173

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

I used a freelance web designer and I only created the core functions to create, send, and manage invoices. Further functions such as expense tracking, recurring invoicing, and quoting were on my development list but I waited with the implementation until I was able to prove that my customers were interested in these additions.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Do your customers really read TechCrunch? Do some Customer Development instead. Spend your time with renewable sources of customers and iterate.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards. So when he saw the browser it instantly dawned on him that this would be the greatest customer development tool ever. Shopping.com. The Wedding Channel. Commission Junction.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

This is completely analogous to the situation elsewhere on the internet, where launching a new website, product, or service with PR is getting harder and harder. Customers and prospects are overwhelmed by the number of media and companies clamoring for their attention. Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Silence.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 210

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. I have personally taught many “non-technical&# people to program – graphic designers, QA folks, even artists and animators. Diversity is not the only requirement for making good group decisions.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

Some designers also hate optimizing (which is why the “41 shades of blue&# test is so famous – a famous designer claims to have quit over it ). After you’ve spent months on a painstaking new design, who wants to be told what color blue to use? It takes some getting used to for most designers, though.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Edwin: Correct, I fully agree and the name MeetingKing already says that my initial focus definitely was on meetings, right? Now what I’ve found is that especially the larger licenses, 10- and 25-user licenses, in the beginning I lost those customers after a couple of months. I think this looks like no designer made this, right?

Technical Cofounder 220

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

All the good domain names were taken, all the good ideas were being implemented. If Id bought just a handful of the "best of the rest" domain names that were available at the time (for a whopping $70 each), I probably could have just retired right then. We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 6, 2020

The folks over at Website Setup published a study where they mentioned some average costs: “Building a good custom website could easily cost $2000 (on the low end). Making changes to the website can still require a freelance designer and a webmaster to help you continually update your site (read: you need to spend additional $$$).” .

SMS 134

SMS Campaign PR Sales 134

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

The ESL equipment were racks of the latest semiconductors designed into a system so complicated that the mean-time-between-failure was measured in days. Before leaving California, the engineers gave me a course in this specialized receiver design. It had no PR agency. he asked me. Were you reading those?” I said, “Absolutely.”

Silicon Valley 278

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 278

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Even worse, entrepreneurs are faced with a constant barrage of vanity metrics from competitors and other companies engaged in PR. Or take a recent TechCrunch article about a startup I wont name: “X billion messages sent since June 2009.&# The PR firm helpfully left out that context.) Vanity metrics are generally bigger.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

Duct Tape Marketing

MARCH 1, 2016

Promoting your referral program that supports local non-profits is a great way to use PR to enhance your referral program. Let’s say you sell a pretty standard $4,000 web design package. Create workshops and offer to conduct them for your partner’s customers. Allow them to co-brand the information and use it freely.

Lead Generation 28

Lead Generation Channel Partner Campaign 28

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The problem is that many programmers have loads of talent with no product sense and business students have great designs with no way to implement them. Programmers feel exploited when they build out a product that is successful but are reluctant to admit they wouldn’t have been able to design the product themselves.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

For example I’ve seen folks track branded organic searches (where the person came to the site by searching on your company or product name) against a “pr&# lead source. Designed by. There are also other thing to think about. It all depends on what programs you are running and how you want to measure the overlap.

B2B 42

B2B Metrics Marketing Startup 42

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

(a guide for hackers) (This post was inspired by a conversation with Nivi from Venture Hacks , but is otherwise not his fault) There has been a proliferation of frameworks and metaphors lately that are designed to help startups avoid the all-too-common fatal mistake of failing to find a market. Is a market a set of paying customers?

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

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

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

or their privileging of only certain designers featured in Showcase and promos. I can't do anything for the hurt you experienced in the past, other than to apologize on behalf of all platform designers out there. A customer with a legitimate grievance is not a troll, and should not be treated that way. Clifford Hicks?

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158