Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

If you want to take your business to the next level, you should consider app development. Either way, custom software development is an effective way to build brand awareness and give your business a competitive edge. While app development can be very beneficial, that’s only true if it’s done the right way.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. Set up the Lean LaunchLab or a WordPress blog to document your Customer Development progress. Size the market opportunity.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

They needed to be sure that what they were building was what customers wanted and needed. And if their initial guesses were wrong, they needed a process that would permit them to change early on in the product development process when the cost of changes was small – the famed “pivot”. The result? Carpe Diem – Seize the Cash.

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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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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

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Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 219

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

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 24, 2022

You should also consider running social media ads, as they can be very effective in reaching out to potential customers. Develop a Strong Online Presence. Another important aspect of promoting your startup is developing a strong online presence. In this case, you can seek the help of a professional web development company.

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Social Media Startup Audience Web Development 123

The Equity Kicker

MARCH 3, 2014

It’s surprising how easy it is to ask bad questions during customer development. Most people are a) eager to please, and b) pretty useless at predicting what they will do in the future and these sorts of questions yield bad information which can offer false encouragement. I plan to be asking them a lot.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

One of the key lessons from our Educators Conference is that when teaching online complex information needs to be delivered to students in small, easily processed parts. How to Get, Keep and Grow Customers ? What is Customer Development. What is Customer Discovery and Why Do it? Customer Validation.

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Lean Customer Development Business Model Video 356

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. I was an aggressive, young and a very tactical VP of marketing at Ardent , a supercomputer company – who really hadn’t a clue about the relationship between profound beliefs, customer discovery and strategy.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

It was only after returning to Stanford and taking the Lean Launchpad class that I became convinced that a radically different, customer-centric approach was the solution. I returned to the Air Force Academy as an instructor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, intent on spreading the gospel of Customer Development and Lean.

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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. Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Customer Development , Family/Career.

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Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 332

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development. While it sounds simple , the Build Measure Learn approach to product development is a radical improvement over the traditional Waterfall model used throughout the 20 th century to build and ship products.

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Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

Now at Imperial College Business School and Co-Founder of the Wicked Acceleration Labs , Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad. The objective of this course is that groups of students finish with a completed software product that has real customers and an identified market.

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Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 235

Steve Blank

JANUARY 27, 2011

student of our MS&E department at Stanford ,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship. This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. The 47th (-46) Annual Business Model Competition.

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Business Model Utah Intellectual Property Agile 275

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. Seeing Is Believing. And there it was.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

If you want to compete with them, you’re going to have to develop a reputation and a strong web presence yourself. These don’t require coding skills—they’re usually visual templates that are easy to use but don’t allow for great customization (that would require technical skills). Custom development. WordPress DIY.

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Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

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.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 4, 2014

Next, both parties need to make themselves accessible during business hours and deliver effective and informative communication. Professionalisms business financing business growth customer development Jake Dacillo sales' Keep phone and e-mails on topic, and be proactive should any unexpected problems occur.

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Customer PPC Software Review Finance 168

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2020

We’re holding a series of 5-day online classes at Stanford where teams will learn how to develop new business models for an economy that’s getting back to work and on the road to recovery. We’ll be offering a series of information sessions describing the class, expectations and the application process. For More Information.

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YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

Transportation partners play an enormous role in the supply chain as they bring products into distribution centers and sometimes directly to customers. Develop Relationships with Supply Chain Partners. Develop relationships with each of your supply chain partners and make communication a top priority.

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Management Forecast Los Angeles San Francisco 145

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

In 1978 when I joined my first company , information about how to start companies simply didn’t exist. 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.

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Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

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. And of course the “great firewall,” attempting to keep information about the outside world from reaching inside China. But there are two striking differences.

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China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 323

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

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Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. First I searched the academic literature trying to learn what methods would best convey information that entrepreneurship students could understand, retain, and put to practical use.

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This is going to be BIG.

JULY 18, 2011

Talking to customers is, of course, a good thing. I have seen, however, the customer development process wind up looking like a street corner salesman selling watches out of the inside of his coat. If you don't have unique insight into the nature or the problem, customer development is going to be random and unproductive.

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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. Reply Deepta , on December 7, 2009 at 7:22 am Said: Very informative experience.

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

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.

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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.

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CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 2, 2013

We talk a lot about Customer Development, but there’s nothing like seeing it in action to understand its power. But the big payoff came when their discussions with medical device customers revealed an entirely new way to think about pricing —potentially tripling their revenue.

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Customer Churn Rate Customer Development Lean 323

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

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. And of course the “great firewall,” attempting to keep information about the outside world from reaching inside China. But there are two striking differences.

China 215

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 215

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Through rapid experimentation, short product development cycles, and rigorous measurements of the right metrics, they can ascertain what customers really want. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike.

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Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

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.

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Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

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.

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