Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

Burn Rate 251

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 251

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

The Founder’s New Insight Smart founders are never satisfied with simply executing their current business model, they are constantly observing, orienting and deciding whether their current business model can be made better. But the purpose of this post is what happens when a founder (or large company CEO) finds a better business model.

Customer 216

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 216

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Funding challenges and other issues founders face in the early days of starting up were the focus of interviews with the latest guests on Entrepreneurs are Everywhere , my radio show on SiriusXM Channel 111 (airing weekly Thursdays at 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern). Will Zell , co-founder and CEO of Nikola Labs wireless power company.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

a new type of graphics architecture, or a new communications chip architecture) mean you may not know if the chip performs as well as you thought until you get first silicon. These two numbers have direct impact on revenue and financial health. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here.

Vertical 162

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 162

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 145

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.

Customer Development 267

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Jeremy Johnson , founder of Andela , which embeds talented software engineers on the African continent into top engineering organizations worldwide. Jeremy Johnson.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Luckily (or maybe because we were in Silicon Valley where there was a domain expert for everything) there was a very smart consultant in the retail computer space, Seymour Merrin, who preached about the importance of packaging. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. What’s been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a “playbook.” Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development. I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present.

Artificial Inteligence 323

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 323

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 325

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 325

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 289

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 289

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

(At Stanford, Ann Miura-Ko and I have been working on a simplified Silicon Valley version of this model. As a founder you start out with: 1) a vision of a product with a set of features, 2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? When revenue, users, traffic, etc.,

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The old rules of sustainable revenue and consistent profitability went out the window.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

How founders cope with startup challenges was the focus of today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. And world-class entrepreneurs never quit. Jessica Mah.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

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. Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 201

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. What happened to him? Who was he?

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 179

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Curt Haselton , co-founder and CEO of Haselton Baker Risk Group. — Ultimately, Sunny and his co-founders killed their startup idea. Curt Haselton.

Cofounder 196

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 196

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 260

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

That year the two founders decided to get serious about being a company, and hired a CEO. In today’s language of Customer Development , RIM positioned the Blackberry as a segment of an existing market – pager users who needed two-way communication. New Market Revenue Curve. They did none of that.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 276

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 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Steve Blank

MAY 5, 2016

Founders will always encounter naysayers, shut out the voices and listen to the customers instead. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. It gets you to a business faster. Guido Kovalskys.

Brazil 163

Brazil Entrepreneur Cleveland Cofounder 163

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development. I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present.

Artificial Inteligence 120

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

It’s a process that doesn’t exist in large companies with existing customers and markets. I call this process “Customer Development,” a sibling to “Product Development,” and each and every startup that succeeds recapitulates it, knowingly or not. But it is life and death for a new venture. Looked up for a kindle edition.

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 133

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2011

Years later this area would become known as Silicon Valley. As time went on, I was a co-founder or member of the starting team for six high-tech startups…. But I learned that in Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience. My third story is about Failure and Redemption.

Philadelphia 336

Philadelphia Miami Thailand Silicon Valley 336

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. At HP the founders were still at the company and still running the business.

Silicon Valley 186

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 186

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. What is customer development?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

MAY 5, 2016

Founders will always encounter naysayers, shut out the voices and listen to the customers instead. The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. It gets you to a business faster. Guido Kovalskys.

Brazil 120

Brazil Entrepreneur Cleveland Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

The show follows the journeys of founders who share what it takes to build a startup – from restaurants to rocket scientists, to online gifts to online groceries and more. Curt Haselton , co-founder and CEO of Haselton Baker Risk Group. — Ultimately, Sunny and his co-founders killed their startup idea. Curt Haselton.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Engineer California 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Most publishers are still caught up in an outdated “vision vs. metrics&# argument, which is already obsolete here in Silicon Valley. What is the right revenue model? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? In other words, what is the minimum viable product ?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based. He spoke at the Founder Institute last week, and his advice was to not hire a PR agency until there were so many inbound requests that you can’t handle them yourself. He prefers to interact directly with the founders of a startup. Order Here. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 210

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

This week, the startup tribe from Harvard Business School is making their annual trek to Silicon Valley. It’s a common refrain around Silicon Valley to disparage the role of MBA’s in entrepreneurship. We also cavalierly lampoon the “suits” that get brought in to run startups after the founders are fired by callous VC’s.

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

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

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Equity-Only CTO and Equity-Only Developers - SoCal CTO , November 1, 2010 I had a recent email dialog with the founder of a company looking for a CTO for their startup. And I tried to evaluate the idea and figure out: What did the founder really need here? Was it a Startup Founder Developer Gap ? What went wrong?

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175