Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

” She looked at bit puzzled, so I continued to explain… One of the virtues of using the Business Model Canvas as part of a Lean Startup is that it helps you frame each one of your nine critical hypotheses. Therefore the ideal medical device team might be a physician; engineer; operator; business development/financial analyst.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

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. Also, the “customer relationships” section didn’t seem to fit for many traditional businesses.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

These processes reduce risk to an overall organization, but each layer of process reduces the ability to be agile and lean and – most importantly – responsive to new opportunities and threats. And by product, I mean the creation of new hardware, services, software, tools, operations, tradecraft, etc. Process Versus Product.

Government 320

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 320

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Inversely, if you’re using the agency model to fund another startup or product, you should probably keep things lean. This way, you can focus on business development, communications, and awareness to build a sales pipeline and “validate” early demand. Image source ).

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

In 2012 I got together with Alexander Osterwalder , Henry Chesbrough and Andre Marquis to think about the Lean and the future of corporate innovation. 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.

Lean 329

Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 329

View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

But the best founders I know almost always operate as though they have much less money in the bank, and won’t scale burn until they are super confident in their product/market fit. Experienced founders: B2B. For an experienced founder building in B2B, the round to skip is the pre-seed.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

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. Let’s take your revenue line. It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you’ll charge for your product.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. How can established companies benefit from implementing Lean Startup? Of course, you can also continue the conversation by attending The Lean Startup Conference. What can Lean Startup do about this? They’ll jump in to answer in the coming days. (Of

Lean 167

Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. The Rise of the “Lean VC’s” – Consumer Internet Gets Funded. Here’s why.

Lean 263

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 263

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. How does that stack up?

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. Analytics spark more questions and discussion than almost any other aspect of the Lean Startup method. Alistair and Ben, co-authors of the book Lean Analytics, will help you sort it out in our next webcast, Lean Analytics for Non-tech Companies.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2017

When Colonel Peter Newell headed up the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force (REF) he used lean methods on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to provide immediate technology solutions to urgent problems. Today, his company BMNT does for government and commercial customers what the Rapid Equipping Force did for the U.S.

Lean 120

Lean Kansas Government Afghanistan 120

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 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

No one was actually quite that good, but some VCs had “golden guts” for these kinds of operating issues. I have been working on getting a startup to revenue for a while, and while this is my 4th iteration and I have not yet succeeded, I’ve been learning new things every time. Oh yes, company X, they’re having problem 343.

Silicon Valley 131

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 131

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

To continually innovate, companies need to operate at startup speed and cycle time much longer their 20 th century counterparts did. A few, like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Don Valentine at Sequoia, had operating experience in a large tech company. I’m glad to have been part of the team inventing the Lean Startup methodology.

Restful 243

Restful Silicon Valley Puerto Rico San Jose 243

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

I thing I’ve learned over the years is that technology purists hate advertising even when it is that revenue stream that truthfully drives much of our industry. He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Business schools teach aspiring executives a variety of courses around the execution of known business models, (accounting, organizational behavior, managerial skills, marketing, operations, etc.). We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

Wiki 316

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 316

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Of all the tactics I have advocated as part of the lean startup , none has provoked as many extreme reactions as continuous deployment , a process that allows companies to release software in minutes instead of days, weeks, or months. One large source of waste in development is “double-checking.&#

Continuous Deployment 167

Continuous Deployment Software Review San Francisco Lean 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. Small batches reduce overhead. Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Berkeley and NCIIA , Jerry Engel and I first offered the Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. The class was designed to teach educators (and the adjunct entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship.

Delaware 303

Delaware Lean Entrepreneur Advisory Board 303

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals. If so, which one?

Silicon Valley 269

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 269

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

DECEMBER 26, 2013

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them.

Lean 241

Lean Customer Development Video Early Stage 241

Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2018

The stack consists of: Individual Innovation, Innovation Tools and Activities, Team-based Innovation and Operational Innovation. From the point of view of someone managing an engineering, manufacturing or operations organization, new, unplanned and unscheduled innovations are a distraction and a drag on existing resources.

Programming 325

Programming Incubator Leadership Silicon Valley 325

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. Step 1: Start with a lean plan. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. Subscription Business Trends and Predictions for 2016.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

Berkeley and NCIIA , Jerry Engel and I first offered the Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. The class was designed to teach educators (and the adjunct entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship.

Delaware 195

Delaware Lean Entrepreneur Advisory Board 195

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. Expo SF (May. . Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Lean Startups/Back to Basics (2000-2010): No IPO’s, limited VC cash, lack of confidence and funding fuels “lean startup” era with limited M&A and even less IPO activity. VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 22, 2008 Net Promoter Score: an operational tool to measure customer satisfaction Ive mentioned Net Promoter Score (NPS) in a few previous posts, but havent had a chance to describe it in detail yet. The whole episode cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

.Net 158

.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

Hershey just bought Krave Jerky, a team in our 2011 Berkeley Lean LaunchPad class, for >$200 million. —– Jon Sebastiani and his team came into the 2011 Berkeley Lean LaunchPad class with several key observations: Snack foods were a large ~$35 billion but the moribund food category was starving for innovation and modernization.

North America 120

North America Lean Customer Development Distribution 120

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2016

Intel under their last two CEOs delivered more revenue and profit than any ever before. In contrast, startups operate with speed and urgency, making decisions with incomplete information. They’re better than large companies at identifying customer needs/problems and finding product/market fit by pivoting rapidly.

Architecture 227

Architecture IRR Balance Sheet Liquidity Event 227

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue? The Lean Startup is the way most innovators build startups and innovate inside of existing companies. From Revenue Streams to Mission Achievement. Does legal need to sign off for cyber operations?

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 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. It needs the tools and processes pioneered in Lean Startups. What Does this Mean? What to Do?

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 28, 2009

You can train your operations or customer service staff on how it works - all live in the production environment. There are huge classes of bugs that "work as designed" but cause catastrophic changes in customer behavior. No automated test is going to catch that, but it still will drive revenue to zero. Expo SF (May.

Continuous Deployment 122

Continuous Deployment San Francisco Lean Metrics 122

David Teten

OCTOBER 1, 2015

portfolio operator VCs, e.g., Andreessen Horowitz, ff Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Google Ventures. I’ve talked with a number of software development shops who are eager to get into the business of cofounding companies, i.e., getting product revenue and equity instead of just consulting revenue.

Software Developers 60

Software Developers Software Development Software Review Technical Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 179

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158