Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe 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. After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. They never understood Market Type. End result?

Customer Development 205

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 205

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. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. The Adventure Begins.

Lean 303

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 303

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Then, consider how you’ll reach your customers and what kind of relationship you want to build with them. Revenue streams are another critical component of your business model. It’s not just about a logo or a tagline; it’s the experience you promise your customers.

Intellectual Property 158

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 158

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 225

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 225

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 23, 2015

Knowing your customers is the single biggest driver of startup success, and there’s no substitute for getting out of the building to learn about their problems and needs. Jason Young , co-founder of MindBlown Labs , which makes mobile social games to teach young adults about personal finance. And download any of the past shows here.).

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Colorado Customer Development 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

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

AUGUST 15, 2016

Prior to founding Carely , Michael Eidsaune earned his MBA in finance and spent several years in investment management, eventually earning his level 1 CFA certification. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Cofounder 145

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 145

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Second, the leaders of these companies tended to be those who excelled at finance, supply chain or production. Intel under their last two CEOs delivered more revenue and profit than any ever before. Risk capital has provided financing for new ideas in the form of startups. They knew how to execute the current business model.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Prior to founding Carely , Michael Eidsaune earned his MBA in finance and spent several years in investment management, eventually earning his level 1 CFA certification. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups. This is a big idea. What Does this Mean?

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

What CEOs, management teams and shareholders care about is growth —revenue growth, greater user adoption, increased market share, bigger margins, etc. in developing these new models. It only emerges after an intense business model design and search activity based on the customer development process.

Lean 329

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 329

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

A 20 th century VC was likely to have an MBA or finance background. This would continue for months, as customers weren’t behaving as per the business plan. Meanwhile every other department in the company would be making their plan – meaning the company was burning cash without bringing in revenue.

Restful 230

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 230

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

But then, because there might be entrenched competitors and your concept is radically new, you still need to invest in the customer development process to learn how to get design wins from companies who may be happy with their existing vendors. These two numbers have direct impact on revenue and financial health.

Vertical 148

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 148

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

I hear similar things for pre-revenue startups that are on schedule, on time, and on budget - even though they are busy building something that nobody wants. (In In fact, this crisis was at the heart of Steve Blank ’s original impetus to develop customer development as an alternative set of milestones to use for startups.)

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

How do we finance the company, etc. Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. How Does Customer Development, Agile Development and Lean Startups Fit?

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2010

The company had innovated, found a business model, grown successfully but now even as revenues continued to grow, the company was slowly but surely dying. As the revenues grew, engineering continued to pursue sustaining innovations - incremental improvements on its core technologies. It was impressive. More on this in another post.).

Silicon Valley 272

Silicon Valley Cofounder Acquisition Kansas 272

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

Recently, the financing of innovation in medical devices has collapsed even further with most Class III devices simply unfundable. on medical device revenues, regardless of profitability delays or cash-flow breakeven. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Science and Industrial Policy , Teaching.

Startup 299

Startup Venture Capital Lean IPO 299

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I had been confused for years why I had to update an income statement each board meeting that said zero for 18 months before we had any revenue. As a founder you are testing a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? How do we finance the company, etc. Customer Acquisition.

Balance Sheet 303

Balance Sheet Startup Burn Rate Metrics 303

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works. What types of revenue streams are there?

Wiki 315

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 315

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

Until 1995 startups going public typically had a track record of revenue and profits. Suddenly there was a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit. They’ve created virtual IPO’s for founders and employees via late-stage private financing. Netscape’s 1995 IPO changed the rules. Yet while the U.S.

Venture Capital 302

Venture Capital IPO Liquidity Event Entrepreneur 302

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Now with customers and early revenue, it was out raising its first round of venture money. They grow their business via profits or traditional bank financing. Posted in Customer Development, Durant versus Sloan, Technology, Venture Capital. The Web and Startups. Which one is “right” is up to you, not the crowd.

Hockey Stick 288

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 288

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2016

She and her team ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, went through the Techstars Boulder 2015 accelerator program, and recently closed a $3 million financing round with The Foundry Group. . I thought all of these are raising $5 million, $10 million, $15 million pre-revenue. Filed under: Customer Development.

Entrepreneur 264

Entrepreneur Cofounder San Francisco Campaign 264

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

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. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 23, 2012

After I sold Smart Bear, that division has increased revenue and profit every year, for five years, even through the 2008/2009 economic disaster. GroupOn’s engine that turned capital into revenue growth was a form of force-feeding rather than building a product). But really, are all those acquirers so stupid? Surely not.

IPO 240

IPO Flash Bootstrapping Private Equity 240

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

If you never have, you can create your own using Google Finance. They were accustomed to measuring their progress primarily by gross revenue compared to their targets. It turned out that, during the course of the decline, one customer segment was losing customers while another was gaining customers.

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. Finance, IT, Legal). The Proof Is In The Revenue. Your First Iteration of an Idea Will Be Wrong. What went wrong?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

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. So that means stuff like thinking about what a business model might be, it does mean customer development. So I have a question for you, Jason.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2010

Do they “get&# Customer Development ? They understand that now’s not the time to hire a senior VP of Sales to start to scale the sales force or to look for a finance department to create income statements that say zero each month. Do They Get Customer Development? Have they heard about Customer Development ?

Founder 232

Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 232

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 4, 2009

But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company. All the strategic thinking in the world won’t make up for a missed revenue plan. If sales revenue and profits are high enough, we could take the company public or sell it, and the stock would be worth more than the paper it was printed on.

Silicon Valley 127

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 127

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. Veritas turbines.

South Dakota 224

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 224

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2016

She and her team ran a successful Kickstarter campaign, went through the Techstars Boulder 2015 accelerator program, and recently closed a $3 million financing round with The Foundry Group. . I thought all of these are raising $5 million, $10 million, $15 million pre-revenue. Filed under: Customer Development.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Cofounder San Francisco Campaign 120

www.instigatorblog.com

MARCH 2, 2010

The Importance of Advisory Boards for Startup CEOs Tweet When a startup receives financing it will need to setup a Board of Directors. What many first-time CEOs might not realize is that they may need to setup an Advisory Board as a condition of receiving financing. Mark Macleod spells it out beautifully in his post on Advisory Boards.

Advisory Board 40

Advisory Board Startup Cofounder Equity 40

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan kept the corporate staff small and focused on policymaking, corporate finance and planning. Durant Versus Sloan – Part 1 « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1 – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

Silicon Valley 163

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 163

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

They asked for my advice, and we went through a number of recommendations that readers of this blog will already be able to guess: adding revenue opportunities, engagement loop optimization, and some immediate split-testing to figure out whats working and whats not. Its a version of the law of compounding interest.

San Francisco 79

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google's App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job, and requires a lot of custom development. The long tail apps can easily be ported to or developed on Google App Engine in a third of the time and cost using OrangeScape as an application platform. Enter OrangeScape.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur India Silicon Valley Massachusetts 114