Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. The real risk in markets like Web 2.0 is whether there is a customer and market for the product as spec’d. Steve,&# he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 162

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

The department had hired a recruiter and was interviewing candidates from other chip companies. 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

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

“Black Hole of Packaging&# Strategy Since we had no facts, other than my opinion that something wasn’t right, I took our staff on a field trip. ( You can’t do marketing from inside the building.) The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

You still need to be comfortable with chaos and uncertainty, but by this time the major risk of where the first round of funding is coming from is gone. a comment » Yet another brilliant post from Steve Blank, this time about what it takes to found, co-found, or work in a startup at various stages of [.]

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 229

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

From 1979 when pensions funds began fueling the expansion of venture capital, the way VC’s sold their portion of your company was to help you take your company “public.” For the next four or five years, technology M&A boomed, growing from 50 in 2003 to 450 in 2006. Each VC firm/partner has a different spin on what to weigh more.)

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

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. In 1996 no potential customer had even heard of a Personal Digital Assistant.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Ignore This Post The same caveat applies as in the first post; If you’re selling via the web, and trade shows seem hopelessly anachronistic, ignore this post. To close the loop between leads and orders, always offer a sales commission bonus for orders that came from leads followed up from a show.

Silicon Valley 136

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 136

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. The same was true for PR.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees. Thats an important job, for sure, and Ive been called upon to do it from time to time.

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CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. However, there’s the other side of the coin, which is the product design.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

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 284

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.”

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 206

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

Nuclear Weapons Laboratories used supercomputers to run their hydrodynamics codes for nuclear weapon design and the National Security Agency used them to decrypt codes. I had the only farm capable of nuclear weapons design. Cray called two years ago and bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 210

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. (You can use static methods like Monte Carlo simulation, or dynamic methods using continuous or discrete simulation.) However, for the Web 2.0

Vertical 137

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 137

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

My observation was that they had the “Going to Trade Shows&# part down, they just needed to add the “Like it Matters.&# ———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Setting Clear Trade Show Objectives There’s no use going to a show if you don’t know why.

Silicon Valley 203

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Reply Customer Development and Start-up Models « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on March 26, 2009 at 3:06 am Said: [.] We plan to have the many large dishes assembled for Moon Bounce, connected with live feeds on line, so EME, so the public will be able to be listened to from the web. Order Here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 120

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. Lets see why.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

But few realize how this differs from most of the population. She believed she had done all things that could be expected from her and was waiting for the result. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal. 45 is efficient.

Silicon Valley 331

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 331

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. And learn from it.” Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation.

Venture Capital 239

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 239

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

And throughout my career as an entrepreneur I kept asking questions of my VC investors and friends; Where did entrepreneurship come from? Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. But no one was writing about where the entrepreneurial culture had come from.

Silicon Valley 297

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 297

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. One warm summer evening I got invited over to the house of a married couple from my company for a BBQ and after-dinner entertainment – drinking mass quantities of the local beer.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 210

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. The Adventure of a Lifetime.

Entrepreneur 291

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 291

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

And the kinds of failures that do get airtime are usually failures to adequately plan, anticipate, or design in advance. So, naturally, the kinds of inferences we make from these stories are: we need heroic entrepreneurs, with absolute certainty in a brilliant idea, and we need to plan and execute well. I emphatically do.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean PR Metrics 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. I really enjoy your posts – thank you for taking time to place your experiences up on the web. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Sign me up.

Agile 265

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 265

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

The positive effect of the tidal wave of press was as a door opener for us to raise money from corporate partners. Our VP of Business Development had no problems getting meetings and fund raising was easy. For years the one solace I was able to take from the Rocket Science debacle was that I had got the branding right.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

Weve got a little funding from VCs. You show this by giving completely generic arguments to one line sentences from his post. From "Think and Grow Rich". He chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. Isnt it? >>

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

For short stories - I think it is always good to introduce some practical problem (you might have heard from entrepreneur at early stage) and how the lean startup method helped solved that. To a certain extent this echoes other comments, but I always find it very useful to hear battle stories from the field. Expo SF (May. .

Lean 68

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 68

conversionxl.com

FEBRUARY 4, 2014

What follows is a list of resources that can be applied specifically to landing page optimization, found here on ConversionXL & from other great websites around the web. We’ve organized everything to best simulate a visitor’s experience on a landing page from first click to final conversion. Complete Guide to A/B Testing.

Analytics 98

Analytics Software Review Conversion Video 98

Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

JULY 1, 2010

Google Forms Simply go to [link] and select “Create new” / “Form” and you will be presented with a very good form designer. KissInsights KissInsights is a new service from the creators of KissMetrics that allows you to display a non-intrusive but highly effective widget on your website or blog. The answers are saved in a spreadsheet.

Lean 38

Lean Customer Ruby Startup 38

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Lessons Learned is the best RSS source in my overflowing Newsgator Online account. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0. Tell your Startup Visa story Speaking 2010: Webstock, GDC, Web 2.0, Expo SF (May. .

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 60

Aymeric Gaurat-Apelli

JULY 1, 2010

Google Forms Simply go to [link] and select “Create new” / “Form” and you will be presented with a very good form designer. KissInsights KissInsights is a new service from the creators of KissMetrics that allows you to display a non-intrusive but highly effective widget on your website or blog. The answers are saved in a spreadsheet.

Lean 32

Lean Customer Ruby Startup 32

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers. On the web, we have many of these channels: SEM, SEO, world of mouth, PR and viral. It is a mystery actually whether the tagging of application as hot/popular has to do with the number of downloads or merely from the usage statistic. October 13, 2008 8:25 AM Eric said.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all startups. The guidelines I had originally proposed to my students worked for enterprise software or Web 2.0 Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

Vertical 156

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 156

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

I built a multi-million dollar company (and sold it) from New Brunswick Canada. If you’re an Entrepreneur, you can do it from any place in the world. I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. I’m studying design. Thanks, Phil Up North. Radian6 just did the same thing.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 26, 2009

These technology startups had no risk capital – just customers/purchase orders from government/military/intelligence agencies. Doroit had the right idea with ARD (funding startups out of MIT and Harvard and raising money from outsiders who weren’t part of a private family) but picked the wrong model for raising capital for his firm.

Silicon Valley 178

Silicon Valley Securities and Exchange Commission Venture Capital RSS 178

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Steve Blank , January 25, 2010 10 Tips for Adding Game Mechanics to a Non-Gaming Service - ReadWriteStart , September 21, 2010 Startups & VCs: Learn How to Design, Market, & Eat Your Own. - 500 Hats , February 1, 2010 When to Use Facebook Connect – Twitter Oauth – Google Friend Connect for Authentication? First Principles.

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

Rocket watcher b2b marketing metrics View more presentations from April Dunford. Days lead to opportunity – this is an important metric where you are handing over from an inside sales team that qualifies a lead to an outside sales team that accepts the lead as an opportunity. If you enjoyed that, you should subscribe!

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B2B Metrics Marketing Startup 42