Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. Would you mind if you could share to us the name your competitor who stole your ideas ?

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. Large companies were acquiring technology startups just to get in the game at the same absurd prices.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

My boss, the CEO, had just come from a string of successes at Convergent Technologies, Intel and Digital Equipment, names that at that time carried a lot of weight. Your response and version #3 begs another question, namely: was everyone treated this way or just you? Customer development isn’t just for [.]

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Follow the Leader At the conference I attended a bunch of technical sessions, and got lost when the speaker got past, “My name is xxx.” Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.]

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) It was my ex boss from Convergent Technologies, “Steve we’ve all just resigned from Convergent and we’re starting a new company.

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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. Tell Me How to Find You But having benchmarks in hand that showed us as the winner did us no good unless all our potential customers could see them.

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Zilog produced one of the first 8-bit microprocessors , the Z-80 (competing at the time with Intel’s 8080 , Motorola 6800, and MOS Technology 6502.) You created it and own it.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2011

And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about who I worked for (and the names of agencies.). Second, to share how my how my thinking about entrepreneurship as a distinct practice and how Customer Development as one of its central components has evolved over the last decade.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

I didn’t recognize the behavior at the time, but anyone who loves technology and gadgets has at one time or another has bought a technology toy – USB memory sticks, iPod Shuffles, umbrellas with LED lights, alarm clocks that talked, Flip Video Cameras, etc. You may know it by its final name. The Novelty effect?

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents. 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.

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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. At ESL Military Intelligence Was No Longer an Oxymoron Perry not only took his best managers, but he also took his customers, and his desire to build a company culture that was the antithesis of working for a phone company.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

Using my existing skills and resources (including an old domain name), I tested a productized digital PR offer. Interviewing your customers can reveal the priorities they’re aware of. However, as an agency, clients expect you to be knowledgeable about shifts in the market, new technologies, approaches, tactics, and methodologies.

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

If you’re a startup raising money or just want to see your name online, there’s not a better blog on the web. Reading this TechCrunch post made me remember the first time I saw someone confront a worldview they didn’t expect. Discovering that your worldview is wrong or mistaken can be a life-changing event.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

A large number of these customers had mailed back their registration cards (this was pre-Internet) with their names, phone numbers, job titles, etc. So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” Silence.

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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.)

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

VCs tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most are using the same infrastructure tools they have used for the past 20+ years: Excel and recent college grads searching Google. According to Knowledge.VC , under 5% of US VCs have a full-time team member focused on technology. . But we’re doing it slowly.

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steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

My name is Crystal Williams, and I maintain a small business blog called Babeofbusiness.com. Reply steveblank , on September 16, 2009 at 7:00 pm said: Greg, The Google Group “Lean Startup Circle&# at [link] is a wonderful repository of Customer Development/Lean Startup success and failure. Thus, these pages.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

This was about the time Christies and Sotheby’s were starting to auction Soviet space program artifacts , and I was thinking that perhaps a spacesuit in the lobby would be appropriate given our name.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote our conference.” And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America?

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. So that means stuff like thinking about what a business model might be, it does mean customer development. So I have a question for you, Jason.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Where are the charitable foundations, business schools and hospitals named after him? Durant Versus Sloan – Part 1 « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/10/01/durant-versus-sloan-part-1 – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40?

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Do you know the archetype of their customers? An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” This is easy to test.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. Customer Development.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand. They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers. After failing dismally at making disposable digital cameras in 2003 Pure Digital Technologies reinvented their company in 2007 to make the Flip line of camcorders. Agilent is a $5.8 billion dollar test and measurement company.

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

I remember after a month or two of talking to 14-22 year old male gamers (our potential target market,) I realized that for the first time in my career I had no emotional connection to my customers or channel partners. In previous companies I could talk about technology details and how the product features could solve a customers problem.

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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.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not just my students) is that Customer Development means getting out of the building and sharing what you are working on. I just found out that someone stole my idea today and also is using my name with “The&# in front of it. Once it almost mattered.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

As I ran, if I looked at the base behind the fence I was staring at the most advanced technology of the 20th century. He replied, ‘They were found in the ‘name of system I should have absolutely no knowledge or access to’ manuals. I was in between the two thinking of this movie scene. he asked me. I said, “Absolutely.”

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Steve Blank

JULY 23, 2009

I had to decide what I wanted to do with my career – go back to ESL, try to work for the Customer, or stay at Zilog? While it may seem like an easy choice, few people who love technology and who work on black projects leave. These technologies which allowed the U.S. These projects are incredibly seductive. Let me explain why.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Stanford’s research on the earth’s ionosphere would lead to meteor-burst communication systems and Over the Horizon Radar used by the NSA and CIA to detect Soviet and Chinese missile tests and ultimately to the research that made Stealth technologies possible. military had to develop new ways to collect intelligence.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Plus tips on overall trade show strategy.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Now it was up to Marketing is to take the technology as delivered by Engineering and shape it to the needs of the customers and market. By creating these new families of products we could provide real value to our color desktop publishing customers by giving them performance at a price they couldn’t get anywhere else.

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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. >> At this point, I need to develop only a few more simple Web pages and the VCs will be able to see it.

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