Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

Today the National Institutes of Health announced they are offering my Lean LaunchPad class ( I-Corps @ NIH ) to commercialize Life Science. 110 researchers and clinicians, and Principal Investigators got out of the lab and hospital, and talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them.

Lean 269

Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 269

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 262

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 262

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 238

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

The University of Maryland is now integrating the Lean LaunchPad ® into standard innovation and entrepreneurship courses across all 12 colleges within the University. Over 44 classes have embedded the business model canvas and/or Customer Discovery including a year-long course taken by every single one of its bioengineering majors.

Maryland 272

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 272

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. What metrics do we use to see if we learned enough in Customer Discovery ? It’s an impressive portfolio.

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Customer Development Web Developer Customer 219

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. I was just in marketing.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 224

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

Over the weekend I got asked the best way to teach students the principles of Lean via Zoom. I realized that pre-pandemic I had put together a series of two-minute videos called “See Why.” Here’s what I suggested they offer their students: Lean in Context. No Business Plan Survives First Contact With Customers.

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Lean Customer Development Business Model Video 356

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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup.

Lean 244

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 244

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Enter “ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses “, a New York Times bestseller by founder of IMVU (creator of 3D avatars) Eric Ries. Not doing so would end up in wasteful innovations and features that customers do not want.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. As Lean Startup methods have been used now for a number of years, we’ve become increasingly interested in how companies use them to sustain growth. Next Tuesday, October 22 at 10a PT, we’ll take a look at this advanced entrepreneurship question.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

We’re deep into teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The class has talked to 1,440 customers to date.). Digital Health Customer = typically consumer end users. This can be taught.

Lean 258

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 258

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.

Customer Development 166

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

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.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

—– Lean Innovation Management. In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. The result will be: a new, Lean version of the Three Horizons of Innovation. Here’s how.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below.

Customer Development 131

Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building.

Customer Development 124

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 124

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Lean 333

Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 333

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

Once again, along with my partners at 500 Startups, we are proud to present the most substantive track at SXSW: [link] There was a running joke last year that "the Lean Startup track was the only place at SXSW you couldn't get out of the building." We're back!

Lean 165

Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

She was an academic on leave from Stanford now selling SAAS software to large companies, but was being inundated with marketing communications advice. “My I reminded her that all the Lean tools she learned in class–Customer Discovery, business model and value proposition canvases– contained her answer. Here’s how.

Marketing 310

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 310

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development?

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. And what the market needed would, of course, be exactly what we had envisioned.

Lean 315

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 315

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

My guests on Bay Area Ventures on Wharton Business Radio on Sirius XM Channel 111 were: Eric Ries , entrepreneur and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Lean Startup. Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology.

Lean 120

Lean Technical Cofounder Silicon Valley Channel 120

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. After some trial and error, Ive settled on the Lean Startup. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

We’re going to test this hypothesis by teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The teams that took the Lean Launchpad class – get ready for this – had a 60% success rate.

SBIR 314

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 314

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

As the miles sped by I explained to Dave that he had understood only two of the three parts of what makes a Lean Startup successful. One interesting thing about the Lean Startup is that it teaches founders about Sales and Marketing (and a bit of finance) without making them get an MBA or a decade of sales experience.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. I visited Bend last year and caught up with his progress.

Early Stage 286

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 286

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 16, 2009 What is Lean about the Lean Startup? The first step in a lean transformation is learning to tell the difference between value-added activities and waste. I was giving my first-ever webcast on the lean startup. This value is evident in Lean Startups.

Lean 140

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Startup 140

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum. We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and.

Intellectual Property 281

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 281

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. 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. OK, somehow we got them interested.

Lean 298

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 298

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning™. Before I dive too deeply into the Lean Planning methodology, it makes sense to talk about its history and where it comes from. Determine your target market: You need to know and understand your customers.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

This post was co-written by Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein, co-hosts of The Lean Startup Conference. This year, for the first time, we've added a day of workshops and site visits to The Lean Startup Conference. The Lean Entrepreneur: Embrace the Unknown to Go Big with Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper.

Lean 154

Lean Cofounder Analytics Startup 154

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2020

While there’s agreement that companies need to adapt to changing markets, rapidly find new markets, new customers and new revenue models, the question is how ? In these examples CEOs instinctually figured out, 1) their core , and 2) market needs where their competencies/abilities could be used.

Customer 436

Customer Marketing Customer Development Lean 436

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 420

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 12, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Tuesday, January 12, 2010 Amazing lean startup resources A year ago, there was no lean startup movement. I continue to believe that the explosion of interest in the lean startup has very little to do with me. If you are attempting to apply lean startup ideas in your own business - you are not alone.

Lean 146

Lean San Francisco Wiki Startup 146

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 31, 2015

The following is a guest post by Kirsten Cluthe and Ritika Puri from The Lean Startup Conference team Wondering what’s new in the Lean Startup community? Every year, our team conducts more than 500 customer development calls to understand what challenges the community is facing. Here are some of our favorites: 1.

Lean 60

Lean United States Fractional CTO Startup 60