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. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. Market Type But most startups aren’t in existing markets.

Silicon Valley 143

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. The rest is worth reading as well. You’re not joining a big company. steve Am I a Founder?

Cofounder 229

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

To do this they have to accomplish five things; 1) get deal flow – via networking and legwork, they identify likely industries, companies and teams with the potential for rapid growth (less than 10 years), 2) evaluate those companies and teams on the basis of technology, market opportunity, and team.

Silicon Valley 235

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Scalable startups are on a trajectory for a billion dollar market cap. 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. has a large enough market that most U.S. ———-.

Global 335

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac. But the rest of the management team really skeptical. Little did we know.

Video 184

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Status Report At Ardent the marketing department was responsible for acquiring applications for our supercomputer. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. Me: How about Dyna 3D ?

Silicon Valley 331

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

While I was waiting in the lobby to pick up my offer letter, the head of marketing communications (who was to be one of my direct reports) came up to me as I held my just signed employment agreement. OK, let’s start with the basics, who does marketing think our customers are?” The obvious one’s were who were they?

Silicon Valley 210

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

As an early employee I worked all hours of the day, never hesitated to jump on a “ red-eye ” plane to see a customer at the drop of a hat, and did what was necessary to make the company a winner. A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. The Adventure of a Lifetime.

Entrepreneur 291

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. And in the 1960s ESL’s customers asked the company to analyze and interpret telemetry data even though this was a traditional function of the “customer.&# And the rest is history. Arms control with the U.S.

Silicon Valley 194

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It’s been thirty years, but every once an awhile I still wonder what happened to the rest of their lives. By the time I came back to the United States, he was gone from the company. Too often people abandon their ethics because “hey the other guys is doing it, I have to to do it to compete.&# I’m not buying it… literally.

Silicon Valley 210

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Maybe It’s Me When I got to the SuperMac, our Marketing Communications group told me about our “award-winning&# retail packaging for our graphics boards. Her packaging class was so good that we sent every new marketer at SuperMac to take it. Yet when I saw our retail package, I was confused. Worry about the sales results.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

And even better, marketing got to design the graphics for the lobby and hallway (bright and colorful neon) to better represent the color graphics business we were in. While our competitors furiously worked on regaining market share, we were arguing about whether the carpets should be wool or nylon. I was great at “office wars.”)

Silicon Valley 230

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

Filed under: Marketing , Technology , Venture Capital | Tagged: Steve Blank , Venture Capital , Entrepreneurs , Early Stage Startup , Tips for Startups « Customer Analytics – From Those Who Should Know SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot » 14 Responses Michael F.

Business Plan 156

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Startups , Early Stage Startup , Tips for Startups « The Curse of a New Building Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters – Part 1 » 33 Responses William , on May 18, 2009 at 5:44 am Said: Heh.

Founder 310

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

We had moved our game development facilities from Berkeley and Palo Alto and consolidated into one building on Townsend Street in the “ South of Market &# neighborhood in San Francisco. Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched.

Silicon Valley 137

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

But, as any startup can tell you, this opens up a tremendous set of opportunities for the rest of us. Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. The key tools of this new marketing are: targeting, filtering, and customer insight.

San Francisco 113

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Since it was the military and I was a lowly airman (I was outranked by the rest of the entire air force), the answer I got was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? It gave me a sense of purpose for the rest of the war.

Silicon Valley 267

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

At some point in my career as I began to formulate thoughts about mission and intent , I started to think about the broader role of marketing in a growing technology company. It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales.

Silicon Valley 132

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) Before you go to a trade show sales and marketing need to agree to measurable goals. you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources. Visually, demo’s, wild colors, etc.

Silicon Valley 203

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

A+ in one or two courses every semester and mediocre in the rest. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. You just get successful. This was basically my m.o. in school. They do great stuff.

Silicon Valley 332

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 332

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.) car market.

Silicon Valley 179

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

It didn’t make my marketing skills any worse or better, but moved me to play forever on a different field. If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

At the end of a run I used to lay out and relax on the rocks to rest – at least I did, until the guards asked if I knew that there were more poisonous things per square foot here than anywhere in the world.) ESL had no marketing people. I was in between the two thinking of this movie scene. (At It had no PR agency.

Silicon Valley 278

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

The signals displayed by the ALR-20 were used to control the jammers of the rest of electronic countermeasures systems – putting out enormous number of kilowatts using brute force noise jamming and later on some much more sophisticated jamming techniques. And because of his training, an EWO could identify and prioritize the threats.

Silicon Valley 224

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Now we were faced with the fact that even though we were gaining market share daily, there was nothing coming out of Engineering. Marketing Gets into the Engineering Business The next day I walked in uninvited to the VP of Engineering’s office and asked if he had a minute. All tailored to our color publishing market.

Silicon Valley 145

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Family Rules My wife and I agreed to a few rules upfront and made up the rest as went along. Second, it set a cultural norm at my startups, first at Supermac as the VP of Marketing, then at Rocket Science as the CEO and at E.piphany as President. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts.

Entrepreneur 333

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news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

We already have some competitors in the vertical and while there is no point in trying to hide the actual idea, there are differences in the way we implement stuff that can get us an advantage over the competition. >> Investors are looking for proven entrepreneurs to enter this emerging market and they will get well funded too.

Stealth 41

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