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 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

YoungUpstarts

DECEMBER 9, 2013

Unless you’re running your business from underneath a rock, you know that losing a customer is a big deal because it has a significant impact on your organizational health. Besides the loss of potential future revenue, any sunk costs (costs you initially incur to gain the customer) are unrecoverable.

Customer 170

Customer Technical Review Florida Cofounder 170

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.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

Finally to have a better chance of a viable enterprise, they need to test all the other hypotheses in their business/mission model (pricing, demand creation, revenue, costs, etc.). The key principles of customer development are: There are no facts inside the building so get the heck outside. Hello, my name is xx.

Customer 422

Customer Business Model Restful Video 422

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 9, 2012

TLDR: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits , authors of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development are back with a new book called The Lean Entrepreneur. It took the idea of Customer Development and made it accessible to a whole new audience. Illustrations by FAKEGRIMLOCK. You can pre-order it starting today.

Entrepreneur 167

Entrepreneur Lean Southern California San Diego 167

The Startup Magazine

MARCH 29, 2024

Then, consider how you’ll reach your customers and what kind of relationship you want to build with them. Revenue streams are another critical component of your business model. Optimising Your Operations Efficiency is the name of the game when it comes to operations.

Intellectual Property 120

Intellectual Property Angel Investor Business Model Bootstrapping 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

For the past 30 years great colleges have approached recruitment by creating a list of names from the PSATs and then sending out glossy brochures. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Cofounder 147

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 147

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

For the past 30 years great colleges have approached recruitment by creating a list of names from the PSATs and then sending out glossy brochures. Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Cofounder 120

Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 120

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

. - Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. So who are your potential high-value Rock Star customers? Not necessarily.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Inbound interest for partnerships, for employment, for investment (increased) — you name it from small companies, small HVAC contractors to large companies like AT&T. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. . … It really exploded our perception and visibility in the United States. Orders increased.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

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? Unlike an org chart, which describes how a company executes to deliver known products to known customers, the business model canvas illustrates the search for the unknowns that most new ventures face.

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. With Netscape’s IPO , there was suddenly a public market for companies with limited revenue and no profit.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

JULY 22, 2010

Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch. The board was getting nervous as the company was missing its revenue plan. He went through his product feature by feature and matched them to the customer problems. Here’s an example in a direct sales channel.

Forecast 279

Forecast Sales Customer Customer Development 279

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. Instead you will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup actually works. What did you discover from customers?

Wiki 318

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 318

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. Not their own name, or any other identifying information. If you can’t see the presentation click here.

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. Not their own name, or any other identifying information. If you can’t see the presentation click here.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2012

When the results were compared with ordinary product development projects at 3M, the differences were dramatic: Lead-user innovations achieved average revenue of $146 million in their fifth year, compared with $18 million for internally generated innovations. Connect with your prospects (a.k.a., their peers). An example is “Mr.

Customer 168

Customer Social Media Retention Canada 168

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Now with customers and early revenue, it was out raising its first round of venture money. Staring at us in the board meeting were three term-sheets from brand name VC’s and an unexpected buy-out offer from Google. Posted in Customer Development, Durant versus Sloan, Technology, Venture Capital.

Hockey Stick 303

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 303

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. 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

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

The new device could hold names, email addresses, phone and fax numbers and incoming and outgoing messages. 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. Are you cheaper?

Hockey Stick 279

Hockey Stick Customer Development Silicon Valley Networking 279

ConversionXL

JULY 1, 2014

Afraid: Works in my country: Works for me: Failed before, what’s different: While Noah didn’t disclose the exact lift in conversions or revenue this process brought about, he did say it “literally changed the product overnight.”. You can attach code names to those people. Read the full story here.

Customer 76

Customer Design Software Review Lead Generation 76

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 1, 2013

Lean Startup techniques have been taking off in the social-mission sector, helping people solve problems more effectively, and earning the name Lean Impact. And "Lean Impact" offers a reference point for people to start that conversation—there is real power in naming. Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference.

Lean 167

Lean San Francisco Metrics Angel Investor 167

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 184

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 184

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 9, 2018

For revenue streams figure out who’s going to pay. Fill in the market spaces with the names of the companies that are representative players in each of the adjacent markets. Rent Seekers take advantage of regulatory capture to protect their interests against the new innovators. Understand Who Pays. Is it the end user? An insurer?

Marketing 326

Marketing Startup Government SEC 326

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 126

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. Achieving consensus about every corner case from each stakeholder in the room is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.)

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 208

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

HOF Capital has stitched together our workflow across Google Suite , Slack , Airtable , Asana , Streak , and some other tools (leveraging Zapier for basic 3rd party integration, in addition to custom development for certain other integrations).

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Hearpreneur

JULY 30, 2016

The short answer was no and whilst many of the businesses present had a large technology component to their company, with custom developed software etc they could not present themselves as a tech company. But only around 2% will actually achieve revenues over $1 million dollars. Photo Credit: Aquila Leon-Soon.

Technical Review 48

Technical Review Technical Cofounder Entrepreneur CTO Hire 48

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Its had tremendous impact in many areas: continuous deployment , just-in-time scalability , and even search engine marketing , to name a few. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

YoungUpstarts

AUGUST 15, 2017

by Robbie Kellman Baxter, author of “ The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue “ The fastest growing businesses today have a powerful secret weapon: superusers. This special group of customers goes far beyond using your services regularly and paying promptly.

Community 124

Community LLC Customer Developer 124

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 2, 2020

The stage where your customers are actively researching for more information; during this stage social proof , and testimonials play an important role. The stage in which a customer makes a purchase. The stage in which your customers develop brand loyalty. Building your custom marketing and sales funnel.

Churn Rate 78

Churn Rate Analytics Retention SQL 78

Hunter Walker

MARCH 14, 2014

” While I guess this is better data than not talking to any potential customers, a statement like this is at best, insufficient customer development , and at worst, a false positive that will eventually run your startup aground. ’ There’s a budget line item with your name on it. Of course I want it!

Cofounder 102

Cofounder Customer Development Revenue Naming 102

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 271

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 271

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. The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. Agilent is a $5.8

Silicon Valley 192

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 192

ConversionXL

JUNE 14, 2021

They developed features with their specific audience in mind. million in monthly recurring revenue (at time of writing). It allows customers to peer in and find out if what you’re offering is for them—and if they should stick around to learn more. It could help us shape the future of [COMPANY/PRODUCT NAME].

Software Review 158

Software Review Audience Differentiation Framework 158