Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. What kind of objectives would a startup want or need for sales and marketing? For example, some startup sales execs believe hiring the core sales team is a key objective.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 228

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

In every startup I did, every new course I created, and everything I’ve taught, the phrase “make every day count” took on new meaning when I knew how many were left. When I retired after 21 years working in 8 startups, I was invited to be a guest lecturer at the business school at the University of California Berkeley.

Lean 223

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 223

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, September 30, 2008 What does a startup CTO actually do? When Ive asked mentors of mine who have worked in big companies about the role of the CTO, they usually talk about the importance of being the external face of the companys technology platform; an evangelist to developers, customers, and employees.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

Search 324

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 324

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

It’s not just about a logo or a tagline; it’s the experience you promise your customers. Develop a marketing strategy that leverages both digital and traditional channels. This involves careful budgeting, financial forecasting, and cash flow management. Securing funding can also be a critical step for your venture.

Intellectual Property 135

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 135

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

Ten years ago I started thinking about why startups are different from existing companies. I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. I read a ton of existing literature and came up with a formal methodology for search I called Customer Development. In 2003 U.C.

Lean 292

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 292

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2013

I ran into a small startup at Stanford who wants to fly Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) with a Hyper-spectral camera over farm fields to collect hyper-spectral images. Customer Discovery on Farms. Filed under: Customer Development. Customer Development' Drones over the Heartland. Here’s why.

Product 335

Product Customer Development Forecast Engineer 335

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, June 5, 2009 It’s a startup, not a spreadsheet Some people, when they start to realize the power of using data to inform their decisions, become obsessed with optimization. Unfortunately, most decisions that confront startups lack a definitive right answer. But this is wrong, too.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

magazine is publishing a 12-part series of excerpts from The Startup Owner’s Manual , the new step-by-step “how to” guide for startups. The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book.

Balance Sheet 335

Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

Ten years ago I started thinking about why startups are different from existing companies. I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. I read a ton of existing literature and came up with a formal methodology for search I called Customer Development. In 2003 U.C.

Lean 184

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 184

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. It has become an integral part of startup culture. None of mine did.)

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2012

I offered what I just learned from spending a day at the ranch with the R&D group of a $100 billion corporation along with the insights my Startup Owners Manual co-author Bob Dorf who has several Fortune 100 clients. Forecasts can be based on a series of known conditions. Full disclosure. We will propose some alternatives.

Business Model 334

Business Model Customer Development United States Operations 334

Up and Running

NOVEMBER 10, 2015

” As the managing editor of Bplans, I’ve had the good fortune to learn about business via the content we share; through interviews with LivePlan customers and other business owners; and thanks to brilliant, informal coaching from people like Tim Berry, Noah Parsons, and the rest of the executive leadership team at Palo Alto Software.

Curation 60

Curation Lean Software Review Finder 60

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

I’ve introduced a new class at Stanford to teach engineers, scientists and other professionals how startups really get built. In contrast, startups search for a business model. (Or Or more accurately, startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.)

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money). government agency that supports research in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering - is changing the startup landscape for scientists and engineers. billion U.S.

Engineer 284

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 284

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Last May, I shared the news that long-time Lean Startup advocates Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits were working on a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur featuring illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. LitMotors approach to using Lean Startup to create a new vehicle category. Startup blogging was hardly "cool" back then.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 179

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

At 19 I thought that I would be able to work really hard on my startup, and then in a year we’d have break out success. How founders cope with startup challenges was the focus of today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. I started working with startups and venture capitalists. What happened?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

To give you a better idea of what entrepreneurs in this industry are thinking about during each phase of the startup process, I interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs from all over the world, including our own COO Noah Parsons. Later you will want to come back and create a proper sales forecast, cash flow forecast, and expense budget.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, October 30, 2008 John Doerrs 10 lean startup tips I just saw video of John Doerrs talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn&# roundtable event. Get 18 months or more of cash (runway) in the business against a conservative forecast. Use Google Apps.

Lean 121

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

The only problem that faces startup investors now is how to mine this new data layer efficiently to increase returns.”. For the broader use case of helping startups execute their legal paperwork, Clerky is a focused solution. to motivate their angel community to support their startups. 7) Monitor and report investments.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2012

Customer Validation. E.piphany was an 11-month-old startup with 31 people and on fire. We had closed four $100,000 deals for our customer relationship management software. But if we recommend software tools from another startup, we could say we’re solving the needs of the Sales VP and still keep our jobs.“.

Forecast 296

Forecast Sales Matching Customer Development 296

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Determine your target market: You need to know and understand your customers. Develop a forecast: Basic forecasts and budgets are critical; And tracking them is even more so. Do startups have a manual? Yes, forecasting and budgeting does mean looking into the future, and no one knows the future (at least I don’t!).

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 2, 2020

Like many young SaaS startups, we had no shortage of marketing and sales data, but it wasn’t easy to comprehend. The stage where your customers are actively researching for more information; during this stage social proof , and testimonials play an important role. The stage in which a customer makes a purchase.

Churn Rate 78

Churn Rate Analytics Retention SQL 78

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Over scrambled eggs and diet coke, I listened to this seasoned startup veteran describe the excitement of his students who came to the U.S. Win, lose or draw, these students have a life changing experience where they can network and get smarter as they see what good startup thinking looks like. to compete.

Business Plan 156

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 156

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

And yet it is this same ephemeral nature that gives rise to the most difficult problems of product development: how to tell if were making progress, the high variability of most product development tasks (e.g. and the resulting extreme uncertainty that is, incidentally, the environment where startups thrive.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. It crashed back down to earth as one of the largest startup failures on record. No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer. The result was a classic startup failure writ large. It was a technical tour de force.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

In the summer of 1999, I started working on a startup from my college dorm. And the great ideas that became todays successful tech startups dwarf anything that had been done to that point. Nonetheless, my first startup was a tool for college students from elite colleges to create resumes and help them find jobs. all about luck.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

The startup founder who gets fired just as his/her company is growing into large company could be a cliché – if it wasn’t so true – and painful. Scalable Startups at Adolescence. In our previous post we posited that Scalable Startups are designed to become large companies. Let’s take a look at why.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Because five whys kept turning up a few key metrics that were hard to set static thresholds for, we even had a dynamic prediction algorithm that would make forecasts based on past data, and fire alerts if the metric ever went out of its normal bounds. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Up and Running

JULY 14, 2015

Peter and Jonathan discuss startup incubators, and our guest Caroline talks to us about the “F” word and 10 reasons why startups fail. Startup Incubators – (2:13). Learn more about Techstars , a startup accelerator program. 10 Reasons Why Startups Fail – (9:31). Take your idea there.

Incubator 60

Incubator Email Startup Oregon 60

Up and Running

DECEMBER 5, 2016

Determine your target market: You need to know and understand your customers. Develop a forecast: Basic forecasts and budgets are critical; tracking them is even more so. Do startups have a manual? Build an action plan: How are you going to validate your assumptions and measure progress? Lean Planning is born.

Lean 60

Lean Silicon Valley Business Model Forecast 60

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

Ten years ago I started thinking about why startups are different from existing companies. I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. Experienced entrepreneurs kept finding that no business plan survived first contact with customers. He called it the “Lean Startup.”.

Lean 322

Lean Georgia Michigan Business Model 322

SoCal CTO

AUGUST 3, 2010

Some great content around the intersection of startups and being a Startup CTO in June this year. This continues my series of posts: Top 30 Startup Posts in June 2010 Top 29 Startup Posts May 2010 Startup CTO Top 30 Posts for April 16 Great Startup Posts from March The following are the top items based on social signals.

Software Review 217

Software Review Startup Venture Capital Technical Review 217