Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyers and sellers.) The good news was that customers said that their minimum viable product (easily organizing research papers) was correct. Week 4 of the class.

Customer 239

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 239

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

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.

Customer 424

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 424

ConversionXL

MARCH 4, 2020

That includes how each one defines and measures sessions, users, conversions, etc. There’s not much point in comparing sessions to users or unique conversions per user to total conversions, etc. Thank you pages” for lead forms are often generic—and, by default, set to be indexed by search engines. Why does it happen?

Analytics 88

Analytics IP Metrics Conversion 88

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

They’ve all used growth hacking techniques to grow their user base from zero to millions (and sometimes hundreds of millions). Growth Hacking comes to solve a very common problem in consumer startups: getting to the first x thousand/million users quickly once the product has launched and the hype has passed.

API 167

API Viral Startup Retention 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 268

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 268

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof. There was nothing for the consumer to do.

Video 180

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 180

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

The human tendency to moralize about debt affects engineers, too. For example, at a previous virtual world company , we spent years developing an architecture to cope with millions of simultaneous users. Leverage product development with open source and third parties. Sometimes quick and dirty actually incurs less debt.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Objects in Our Mirror are Larger than they Appear Our first goal was to set up benchmarks to measure the performance of our own graphics boards on the real applications our customers used (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker.) We provided customer references and testimonials supporting the key features we were promoting.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 126

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

Many of our job postings for Engineering positions describe the company as a place “where the word ‘millions’ is used frequently and in many contexts&#. Graphs - Chris Dixon , July 22, 2010 It has become customary to use “ graph &# to refer to the underlying data structures at social networks like Facebook.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. That’s right.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

So I initially gravitated to the CTO title, and not VP of Engineering. But since I spent a long time in a hybrid CTO/VP Engineering role, I still have this nagging question. I want to add one last idea, even though I recognize it is controversial, bordering on the boundary between the CTO and VP Engineering. Heres my take.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. How to move from a free to a paid product without losing all your users. Jason: get into customer development and it’s a big waste.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

First, because the amateurs weren’t SEC-registered, the site had to refer to them with awkward terms like “geniuses.&# In February, they held another all-hands meeting to talk about shutting down the legacy Facebook game, which still had 60,000 active users. Within a month, kaChing observed several interesting things.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

This means users love it, that there’s lots of retention and engagement, even at small numbers. A growth hacker has a vibrant mental dexterity to think of new ways to acquire and loop in users. “A growth hacker has a fascination at why visitors choose to be users and engage and why some products fall flat on their face.

Retention 48

Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2011

Autonomow team members: Jorge Heraud (MS Management, 2011) Business Unit Director, Agriculture, Trimble Navigation, Director of Engineering, Trimble Navigation, MS&E (Stanford), MSEE (Stanford), BSEE (PUCP, Peru). Vogt Holding), PhD Mechanical Engineering (FAU, Germany), MS Engineering (ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Business Model 237

Business Model Nebraska Peru Germany 237

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Simple editing.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

One is used by engineers to refer to the process of getting code fully integrated into production. Another is used by marketing to refer to what customers see. In traditional batch-and-queue development, these two concepts are linked. All customers will see the new software as soon as it’s deployed.

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This is an incredible skill, one that most engineers overlook. Compelling per-customer economics. We had only a small number of customers – if memory serves, only a few thousand active users. But a little math will show that we were making over a dollar per-user per-month. Great Post on Start Ups.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

At a certain point in IMVU’s development, we faced a difficult choice. Some of our most passionate early adopters were using IMVU’s user-generated content capabilities to create illicit content. As you can imagine, this was a lucrative customer segment. Let me give an especially painful example. Choose wisely.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

Sea Jr , Hyliker Cheung , Safak Ozkan , Kah Hong Tay , Eli James , Dan Hvidding , Yariv Sadan , Anon User, Marc Kwiatkowski , Elliot Kolt , Jonathan Joseph , Senad Dizdar , Yoann Padioleau , Ray C. 5 Comments 30 Answers Tristan Kromer , I help entrepreneurs find co-founders.

Developer 42

Developer Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder 42

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Her work included heading Nokia’s location-based services business and app portfolio for emerging markets, which she built from a back-of-a-napkin idea to a 100-person organization with over 10 million users. Corporate venture funds are often referred to as ‘strategic’ investors because of the unique benefits they bring to the table.

Venture Capital 60

Venture Capital Balance Sheet Technical Review Portfolio 60

Duct Tape Marketing

MARCH 1, 2016

Search Engine Optimization – This includes on page and off page optimization activities aimed at generating organic search engine traffic. For example – creating content that makes it easier for your strategic partners to introduce and refer you is a great way to use content marketing to further leverage your referral success.

Lead Generation 28

Lead Generation Channel Partner Campaign 28

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

If you want to read just one answer and get most out of it, read the first answer 36 Answers Saul Klein , Student of - and sometime co-conspira.

Technical Review 51

Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Ask your existing users this question via a survey. If you’re looking for a designer, engineer, or biz marketing guy – go to meetups / conferences that those people would go to. With that live, you’ll be able to show other smart engineers and advisors that you’re willing to take some risk and build something. Then launch.

Technical Review 44

Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

VC Cafe

JANUARY 22, 2012

In the process of acquiring new customers, startups need to persuade, convince or enchant the potential customer to sacrifice a resource, let it be time, money, access to their stream of information, in order to use the startup’s product. The user may take the initial earnings out, but he’ll more likely continue playing.

Startup 122

Startup Oauth Chicago Product 122

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. Ideas for when and how to pay down product design debt? Please comment!

Technical Review 47

Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

His friends at General Electric said he was wasting his time on the gas combustion engine because the world was going electric. -- ErrantX 215 days ago | link. The story of the v-8 engine is a bit different. His quote on the subject, "no amount of finance will cure mismanagement". From "Think and Grow Rich".

Stealth 41

Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

This had bad effects on the user experience, but much worse was the fact that the company was expending energy measuring but not really learning. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? But for a variety of reasons, nobody was reading these reports. It required two things.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

VC Cafe

JANUARY 22, 2012

In the process of acquiring new customers, startups need to persuade, convince or enchant the potential customer to sacrifice a resource, let it be time, money, access to their stream of information, in order to use the startup’s product. For example, several Facebook games offer the option to send other users a virtual gift.

Startup 111

Startup Oauth Chicago Product 111

market-by-numbers.com

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Market By Numbers on Twitter | Entries RSS | Comments RSS Market By Numbers High-Tech Marketing and Customer Development Home What is Customer Development? Market Type and User Class Company identifies a specific marketplace to target. User Class refers to a specific set of users. Please Share!

San Diego 40

San Diego RSS Lean Elevator Pitch 40

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Take this fictional example of a Seedcamp attendee (actually a composite), which I will refer to as Hairbrush 2.0. I even like knowing I control the DNS for millions and millions of Internet users. How about, the potential of millions interacting with your vision, it becoming a staple part of a users online experiences.

San Francisco 111

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 111

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

And in MMOs, of course, it was a fiction-derived term for parallel servers which has managed to stick (many people refer to parallel VW servers as "shards" now). If you have a natural partition point, and a natural place to store data, like a blog and a blogs owner, you can store which partition a blog is on with the blog owners user record.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Labels: listening to customers , recommended reading 7comments: nero500 said. Build the response flow such that it involves minimal user interaction. Ideally a user should be able to respond with a single click (think links for 1-10 rather than a radio buttons and a submit button). What is customer development?

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158