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. it is an art) and again hired professionals. Some men see things as they are and ask why.

Agile 333

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 333

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Chief Information Officer. Unless your business is a religion, I don’t recommend it for a startup these days.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Chief Information Officer. Unless your business is a religion, I don’t recommend it for a startup these days.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

Instead, buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, their social network, or just plain word-of-mouth or customer reviews. As they — and their other customers — realized the value the hackers were creating, LEGO further embraced them.

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

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. Outward facing Universities are just starting to appear, and while there’s a free flow of information inside China, it suffers from the constraints of the Great Firewall. business models.

China 327

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 327

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

That died with waterfall software development. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? How many people will you hire in the first 24 months and in which sequence. This information isn’t hard to find. Do so at your peril.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Gust

APRIL 20, 2014

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Chief Information Officer. Unless your business is a religion, I don’t recommend it for a startup these days.

CTO Hire 171

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 171

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Chief Information Officer. Unless your business is a religion, I don’t recommend it for a startup these days.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

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. Outward facing Universities are just starting to appear, and while there’s a free flow of information inside China, it suffers from the constraints of the Great Firewall. business models.

China 219

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 219

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. And they’ve absorbed and analyzed incredible amounts of information about their topic of concern.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. And they’ve absorbed and analyzed incredible amounts of information about their topic of concern.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

I suggested that to validate their minimum viable product it would be much cheaper to rent a camera and plane or helicopter, and fly over the farmers field, hand process the data and see if that’s the information farmers would pay for. All of sudden what was an additional engineering and development effort now became a small, variable cost.

Customer 321

Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 321

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Use analytics tools to gather information and monitor the landscape you’re about to enter. This will inform your strategy and help you anticipate shifts in the market and adapt your approach accordingly. Hiring the right people is critical, but it’s just the beginning. Don’t underestimate the power of data.

Intellectual Property 135

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 135

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Instead of focusing on “technical specs&# like the rest of the category, we are redefining to Information Delivery as the category with time/cost to Actionable Info as the metric, which is something we can compete on very well. You need to hire the right type of sales people for the type of [.] Very much in addition to the text.

Silicon Valley 157

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. If you can harness the knowledge, natural enthusiasm, and peer influence of your very best customers — I call them “Rock Star” customers — they’ll market, sell, and help develop breakthrough products for your firm better than your internal resources can do, and often at a fraction of the cost.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

We were impressed when we found that they did the in-person interviews by hiring usertesting.com for $39 to set up test scenarios, gave the users specific tasks to accomplish with their minimum viable product, videotaped the customer interactions and summarized customer likes and dislikes.)

Customer 240

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 240

ConversionXL

MARCH 4, 2020

In most cases, fixing discrepancies requires some work by developers, analytics implementation specialists, or other experts. Cross-domain tracking between your site and payment providers can also disrupt the source information for transactions, although it will still report transactions.). How to fix it. Others are more complex.

Analytics 88

Analytics IP Metrics Conversion 88

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

You want to maximize the number of people who give you their contact information, and gather enough information so a sales person can prioritize who to call first. Have enough dead-tree brochures and product sheets on hand before the show so you can snail-mail out the information after you emailed it. Particularly leads.

Silicon Valley 136

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 136

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 29, 2012

We last wrote about the process last April and here is more information about the process and the role that the Kauffman Foundation has played. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. The schedule is uniformly consistent from city to city.

St. Louis 135

St. Louis Kansas City Norway Kansas 135

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.) The Navy informs Terman that, “money was not a problem but time was.” Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs.

Silicon Valley 155

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 155

David Teten

MARCH 28, 2012

The company teams they work with are usually highly motivated entrepreneurs trying to engage in extensive product and customer development efforts for a product they don’t typically have a full vision of, for a customer whose needs are opaque, and for a use case which is ambiguous.

Portfolio 144

Portfolio Private Equity Venture Capital Early Stage 144

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery , iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments. Bob started hiring second rate developers.

Customer Development 332

Customer Development Cofounder Later Stage Software 332

Steve Blank

JULY 14, 2020

MatchBook – Hiring platform structured similarly to dating apps. Voyage – Global travel advisory platform for pandemic information. Florence Health – Telemedicine app to prevent hospitalization of congestive heart failure patients. HomeDoc – Central hub for connecting telemedicine platforms for nursing homes.

Peru 298

Peru Philippines Mobile Global 298

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. I cover this in the Four Steps to the Epiphany.)

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Oops - there went several precious weeks of development effort down the drain. If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? What is customer development?

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

We learned the basics of retail packaging: make the box eye-catching, ensure there was a “why-to-buy&# message, include just enough information to close the sale, fight and pay for eye-level shelf space, etc. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Recent economic events, technological change, and the rapid diffusion of information about the old models have combined to help us all realize just how important entrepreneurship is - and just how little we really know about it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Lean 146

Lean San Francisco Wiki Startup 146

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

The team hired only the best and the brightest. Even more surprisingly, the engineering team was equally vocal about their contention that adding rounded corners would add weeks of development time to the project, which would have pushed it out way past its hard deadline, effectively killing it. Here’s why.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule. As a result, potential customers are being turned away; they can only afford to engage with the customers that are best qualified.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

JUNE 16, 2016

Taking money from investors meant that there was pressure to scale, and pressure to hire, and that hire included a high-powered sales executive, but we did this without understanding our own value proposition. Steve : You mean that’s who your investors were telling you to hire? Go hire a sales exec to scale?

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Ohio 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

That year the two founders decided to get serious about being a company, and hired a CEO. But to businesses where instant information gave you a critical edge (Wall Street, politicians, etc.) Recording video on magnetic tape was developed in the mid 1950’s by Ampex, and had evolved into a consumer-friendly cassette by the late 1960’s.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 276

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

It is written using the information that the company voluntarily shared, and therefore reflects their current thinking and recollections. Special thanks to Pascal-Louis Perez for sharing information and making this post possible. Special thanks to Pascal-Louis Perez for sharing information and making this post possible.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

User-centric and interaction design, test-driven development, continuous integration, services-oriented architectures - the list goes on. During the course of implementing a design, new information will arise, which many times will change the original design. The kinds of "new information" in the quote above are implementation details.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

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. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. Very good and informative.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 4, 2019

This should not be confused with local storage whereby information is stored on the company’s hard drive and servers. Interestingly, there is a high probability that you have stored some of your personal information on the cloud. The developer tools are usually stored on the cloud provider’s servers. Different Cloud Services.

Cloud 82

Cloud Artificial Inteligence Matching Hosting 82

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content. Your blogs are full of rational thoughts and has nuggets of information. Looking forward to more of these.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155