Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

People mistook extra doses of Ajax for a successful product. The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. I have seen really great product people espouse the death of the business plan. Do so at your peril.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Small startups act the same way, simply cloning each other’s products. Perhaps products like WeChat , designed for an international market, might be the beginning of real innovation.

China 327

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 327

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’ve been puzzling out what they would need to do to deploy their value proposition (a product, service or both).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. They’ve been puzzling out what they would need to do to deploy their value proposition (a product, service or both).

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Use analytics tools to gather information and monitor the landscape you’re about to enter. This will inform your strategy and help you anticipate shifts in the market and adapt your approach accordingly. Hiring the right people is critical, but it’s just the beginning. Don’t underestimate the power of data.

Intellectual Property 137

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 137

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

Instead, buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, their social network, or just plain word-of-mouth or customer reviews. He was building a better enterprise software product, and to get the word out, he organized ‘City Tour’ events and neighborhood ‘street teams.’

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Nick Kim , Crosscut’s Head of Platform, in his presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, shared their Platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development. For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. Customer Development.

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

Last week the teams were testing their hypotheses about their Value Proposition (their company’s product or service.) 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.) Let the real learning begin.

Customer 240

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 240

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Small startups act the same way, simply cloning each other’s products. Perhaps products like WeChat , designed for an international market, might be the beginning of real innovation.

China 219

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 219

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Was the company attempting to introduce faster and better products to an existing market? No, not really.

Silicon Valley 157

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 157

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. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

At the time I pointed out to Ashwin that his minimum viable product was actionable data to farmers and not the drone. I wondered if he was still in the drone business, and if not, what had become the current Minimum Viable Product. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Technology. This is a big idea.

Customer 321

Customer Algorithm Customer Development California 321

ReadWriteStart

JANUARY 29, 2012

We last wrote about the process last April and here is more information about the process and the role that the Kauffman Foundation has played. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas and building a minimal viable product. The schedule is uniformly consistent from city to city.

St. Louis 135

St. Louis Kansas City Norway Kansas 135

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

Talented product developers. If you can harness the knowledge, natural enthusiasm, and peer influence of your very best customers — I call them “Rock Star” customers — they’ll market, sell, and help develop breakthrough products for your firm better than your internal resources can do, and often at a fraction of the cost.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Nothing made any difference.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2011

Bob had taken to heart the business model canvas and Customer Development lessons. After graduating he put together a prototype and had quickly marched through Customer Discovery , iterating his product with the help of CIOs and Fortune 1000 IT departments. Bob started hiring second rate developers.

Customer Development 332

Customer Development Cofounder Later Stage Software 332

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

You want to maximize the number of people who give you their contact information, and gather enough information so a sales person can prioritize who to call first. Send PDF versions of brochures and product sheets as soon as you get back to the office. Have sample literature under Lucite and chained to the booth.

Silicon Valley 136

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 136

David Teten

MARCH 28, 2012

The company teams they work with are usually highly motivated entrepreneurs trying to engage in extensive product and customer development efforts for a product they don’t typically have a full vision of, for a customer whose needs are opaque, and for a use case which is ambiguous.

Portfolio 144

Portfolio Private Equity Venture Capital Early Stage 144

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

doing postdoctoral internships, supervised by faculty members or hired staff (many from Fred Terman’s WWII Electronic Warfare lab.) The Navy informs Terman that, “money was not a problem but time was.” Many of the other staff in the applied program were full-time employees hired to work solely on these military programs.

Silicon Valley 155

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 155

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service.

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

ConversionXL

JULY 1, 2014

What do you do when you have a new product coming out, you know the product is good because people who have used say so. You go and run a qualitative survey on those people who clicked through but didn’t buy the product of course! Remember how Noah asked the people who had clicked through but had not purchased the product?

Customer 76

Customer Design Software Review Lead Generation 76

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. And the product that “talked to me&# , the loudest and most seductively, was the one that went home with me.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

It is written using the information that the company voluntarily shared, and therefore reflects their current thinking and recollections. It’s common, perhaps the norm, for startups to pivot like that—to discover that a product is catching on in unintended ways worth pursuing. Do you find it helpful?

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

One of the topics that raised heated debate was whether I had conflated technical design with product design , because I made the admittedly counter-intuitive claim that sometimes good technical design actually leads to increased technical debt. The argument itself got me thinking a lot about design and its role in building products.

Software Review 87

Software Review Design Software San Francisco 87

ConversionXL

MARCH 28, 2014

Even if you’re not creating your own explainer video, this article will help you understand what you should expect from working with a professional production company, so you don’t end lose time, dollars or your hair. Or A Product Demonstration. What Is An Explainer Video? A Tutorial. A Company Overview. Here’s why.

Video 122

Video Software Review Cofounder Metrics 122

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 17, 2010

The team hired only the best and the brightest. The art team would often be involved in the specification phase of a new feature, since they were responsible for the look-and-feel of the product. Meanwhile the drawbacks of functional departments can cause real and lasting harm. Here’s why.

Technical Review 164

Technical Review San Francisco Lean Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Recent economic events, technological change, and the rapid diffusion of information about the old models have combined to help us all realize just how important entrepreneurship is - and just how little we really know about it. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

Lean 146

Lean San Francisco Wiki Startup 146

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

This may sound crazy, coming as it does from an advocate of c harging customers for your product from day one. Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. In fact, this company hasn’t shipped any new products in months.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I continue to collect great content that is the intersection of startups, products, online and technology. Want to know, for example, why Foursquare uses MongoDB to store check-in information? So let’s be very specific: let’s assume your dream job is product manager at Google, working on the Analytics product.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

Describing your product as “new and “never been done before” instead of “we’re just like those others guys, but better” could cost your company billions. That year the two founders decided to get serious about being a company, and hired a CEO. In a major strategy shift, they decided to sell a product directly to businesses.

Hockey Stick 276

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 276

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

Every startup has a chance to change the world, by bringing not just a new product, but an entirely new institution into existence. That institution will touch many people in its life: customers, investors, employees, and everyone they touch as well. Your blogs are full of rational thoughts and has nuggets of information.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, June 8, 2009 Datablindness Most of us are swimming in a sea of data about our products, companies, and teams. For example, a recent event I held started with a customer validation exercise (actually, this example is fictionalized for clarity). Too much of this data is non- actionable.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 4, 2019

This should not be confused with local storage whereby information is stored on the company’s hard drive and servers. Interestingly, there is a high probability that you have stored some of your personal information on the cloud. Oracle aims to help customers develop their operations and enhance their experience with the cloud.

Cloud 82

Cloud Artificial Inteligence Matching Hosting 82

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 19, 2009 Inc Magazine on Minimum Viable Product (and a response) Inc Magazine has a great new piece up about the increasing use of the Minimum Viable Product by businesses (and not just startups). Like many companies, TPGTEX rolls out new products several times a year.

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Steve Blank

JUNE 16, 2016

We didn’t even have a fully baked-out product. Taking money from investors meant that there was pressure to scale, and pressure to hire, and that hire included a high-powered sales executive, but we did this without understanding our own value proposition. Go hire a sales exec to scale? We weren’t ready.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Ohio 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 28, 2008

Its different from selling a product, because it is not part of our regular business practice, is not something that relates to our core competence, and tends not to happen in a repeatable and scalable way. Most important slide: lessons learned Working product Key questions: what does the product do? who is the customer?

San Francisco 128

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 128

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. Very good and informative.

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168