Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Back then, an entrepreneur used a serial product development process that proceeded step-by-step with little if any customer feedback. Waterfall Development was all about execution of the requirements document. Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 19, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter –Customer Discovery in Digital Health.

Lean 253

Lean Customer Development Video Distribution 253

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, April 14, 2009 Validated learning about customers Would you rather have $30,000 or $1 million in revenues for your startup? All things being equal, of course, you’d rather have more revenue rather than less. And yet revenue alone is not a sufficient goal.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2013

Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences. Part 7: Revenue Streams in Life Sciences. Part 8: When Customers Make You Smarter – Customer Discovery in Digital Health.

Lean 252

Lean Customer Development Business Model Channel 252

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. We kept track of all this data by instrumenting the teams with LaunchPad Central software.). Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences.

Lean 243

Lean Customer Development IP Agile 243

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. Startups needed millions of dollars of funding just to get their first product out the door to customers.

Internet 334

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. But these VC’s aren’t Lean because they fund startups with web-based distribution models. Quickly iterate the product in front of customers. Lean VC’s are expert in on-line distribution, Agile and Customer Development.

Lean 260

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 260

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Since the term “cloud computing” was coined in 1996—at least as we have come to understand its meaning—the software as a service industry has exploded. In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

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. The student teams have learned tons about how the State Department is organized and how it works (or doesn’t).

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. The student teams have learned tons about how the State Department is organized and how it works (or doesn’t).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 26, 2013

(We kept track of all this data by instrumenting the teams with LaunchPad Central software.). Part 4: This Will Save us Years – Customer Discovery in Medical Devices. Part 5: Value proposition and customer segments in Life Sciences. Part 6: Distribution channels in Life Sciences.

Lean 239

Lean Customer Development Video Early Stage 239

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

One is explaining the world as it used to work: the importance of gatekeepers, the scarcity implied by limited distribution, and the resulting quality bar that the industry is so proud of. Mostly it is the time and expense required to create the means of distribution for that industry. What is the right revenue model?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. A VC asked me to have lunch with the CEO of a startup building cloud-based enterprise software. The board was getting nervous as the company was missing its revenue plan. Boy did I feel like Rip Van Winkle.)

Forecast 272

Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 272

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly.

Sales 50

Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

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 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

Last week the teams tested their Revenue Models hypotheses: what are customers willing to pay for? Partners are the external companies whose product or service combines with your Value Proposition to create a complete customer solution or “whole product&# to satisfy customers. Week 8 of the class. How many people?

South Dakota 223

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 223

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

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.

Lean 250

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

In companies this would be product line extensions, more efficient supply chain, new distribution channels. In a company you know you’ve been successful when you generate revenue and profit. In those case revenue will become an additional metric. More next week on innovation and the intransigent middle. Now back to the class.

San Diego 143

San Diego Metrics Indonesia Silicon Valley 143

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

I thing I’ve learned over the years is that technology purists hate advertising even when it is that revenue stream that truthfully drives much of our industry. GoTo.com went on to ink huge distribution deals with Microsoft, AOL & Yahoo! He turned his accounting software into a product he could see.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

It would make a lot of sense for someone else to just come along and build our hardware and sell our software without paying for 15 people doing development and engineering, but nobody did that. flavor of a question-and-answer, poll-your-friends site with a distant revenue model and no user acquisition strategy.

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

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. Another great article is from Joel on Software called Duct Tape Programmer.

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. Now he wanted to go off start his own company. We understood none of this. More detail in future posts.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Our tests suite takes nine minutes to run (distributed across 30-40 machines). You cant make these global efficiency improvements until you get clear about the goal of your development process. That leads to a seemingly-obvious question: what is progress in software development? I am not a developer.

Continuous Deployment 123

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

Not even if its generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. And in some cases, they disregard the results of customer focus groups if they sense that the results are incongruous. As you've pointed out, Jobs totally gets that.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 166

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

I would focus on one product and set a goal to generate $1M in yearly revenue from it. Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. Outsourcing is something a big company, with a known customer / problem (that has revenue & traction) does to save cost.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

" => I have not bothered to put up a landing page, survey to test customer demand, or done any customer development whatsoever. "Where is the best place to find a rockstar developer to bring it to life?" It's my perspective as well and I'm not a software engineer let alone a rockstar.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

I too am looking for someone to work with that knows the manufacturing and distribution end of a solid product. Twitter is an excellent distribution channel for us. (B) Take the top 10 largest tech innovators (take your pick of largest by revenue or largest by idea) of the last 20 years in Silicon Valley.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2012

from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. 1940’s – movie studios had to divest their distribution channel – they owned over 50% of the movie theaters in the U.S. After the VCR was introduced, studio revenues took off like a rocket. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

Silicon Valley 336

Silicon Valley Distribution Washington Channel 336

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much. We couldn’t have been more wrong. You earned their loyalty.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158