Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. Here’s why.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. But at times it’s why entrepreneurs can sink their own companies. More on this in later posts.)

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Customer Development and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

Ann who had been my Teaching Assistant while she had finished her PhD at Stanford felt the same frustration about teaching entrepreneurs to assemble a business plan that we knew in the real world wouldn’t survive first contact with customers. After Stanford, Ann joined Mike Maples’ Venture Capital firm Floodgate as a partner.

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Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 235

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The idea of a Business Model competition first emerged when I realized that Business Plan writing ought to be taught in English Departments – as they’re the best example of creative writing entrepreneurs will ever do. This makes sense in a company where your customers, channel and competition are known. The Business Plan ?-

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Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 267

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2012

This is a 3-day program for entrepreneurship faculty from around the world how to teach entrepreneurship via the Lean LaunchPad approach ( business model canvas + customer development ) and bring their entrepreneurship curriculums into the 21st century. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

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Silicon Valley Lean Utah Customer Development 311

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Generate end user demand (to match our revenue goals) Drive that demand into our sales channels Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value) Educate our sales channel(s) Help engineering understand customer needs That was it. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

If we tried to match them on their playing field we’d never catch up. A key lesson is that as an entrepreneur, you get to choose your segment. But with a little bit of thought it struck us that if we attempted to do that, our competitors had a pretty substantial advantage, since they held nearly 90% of combined market share.

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Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. dumped Détente and embraced a new strategy to counter the Warsaw Pact by not matching them tank for tank or solider to solider.

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www.kernelmag.com

MARCH 8, 2012

But if tools are plentiful and costs resemble rounding errors, what stands in the way of the would-be entrepreneur of 2012? Until then, most first-time – and many experienced – entrepreneurs will still struggle to find someone with the necessary technical skills to get their bright ideas off the ground. The Talent Squeeze.

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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. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 206

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If there aren’t any that match your company, create some. Tradeshow Seminars Almost all tradeshows have conferences and seminar sessions; is your company keynoting any? Leading or speaking at any? No is the wrong answer. I can’t imagine your company going to a tradeshow to create awareness and not being a speaker.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 203

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core&# entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing. Does any of this match your experience or people you know?

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 310

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Believing Your Own BS is Toxic Lots of noise and smoke before a product ships seems to be a toxic byproduct of enthusiastic entrepreneurs. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to listen to customers. It’s that as CEO I was too busy talking to the press and raising money to hear customer comments directly.

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Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

The quintessential California couple, they stood out in our crowd as the engineer (in his late 20′s, respected by his peers and the customer) had hair down to his shoulders, sharply contrasting with the military crewcuts of the customers and most of the other contractors.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 210

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

Lessons learned from female founders and women entrepreneurs. After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Consequently, I either needed a tech co-founder or to pay someone to develop the product.

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Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

Welcome back to Smart Bear Live … the show were Jason speaks with entrepreneurs looking to improve their businesses. Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Since we were the hip, new, edgy, “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” video game company (more about “ big hat, no cattle ” startups in subsequent posts,) our office obviously had to match the image. Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco RSS Vertical 137

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Each of my competitors each had 5-10 graphics boards covering a range of prices with performance to match. This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. I went home to think about this. Instead of a product family, we had a single point product. Even our current product line had four graphics boards in it. What could we do?

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Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 145