Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. Here’s what the product development diagram looks like from a sales perspective.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter? End result?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

And while technically correct, and eventually the company ought to fire unprofitable customers, the result when done by impatient founders is most often less than optimal. While it is “just business,” many customers form emotional bonds sometimes with products, other times with the company itself. And they rarely come back.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.” To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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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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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Markets with Customer/Market Risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product. is whether there is a customer and market for the product as spec’d. In these markets it’s all about customer/market risk. Based on this insight, I updated my earlier diagram to look like this. (The

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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. Market Type But most startups aren’t in existing markets. I cover this in the Four Steps to the Epiphany.)

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

How much longer until they start compromising their products or service under other dubious exercises in logic. Also, his #1 advice for getting coverage on TechCrunch was to make a great product. There’s just no substitute for having a great product that people love. Customers walk, patients sue, and people vote.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

My two cents is that a business plan is the single place to collect your thinking about about your: business model, distribution channel, demand creation plan, financial assumptions, and customer and product development plan. Funny, but with their feedback, we changed several parts of the product. Now In Print!

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Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 143

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

AgileZen – project management visually see and interact with your work Kanbanery – Simple online team or personal kanban board LeanKit Kanban – Great for visualizing work of product development Kanban Pad – “Nice and lean” and free online Kanban tool Banana Scrum – A tool simple as Scrum itself.

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Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. Have you worked with or for a great CTO?

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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.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009

Unintended Lessons « Steve Blank steveblank.com/2009/09/28/unintended-lessons – view page – cached + Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) + Can You Trust Any VC’s Under 40? To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

In hindsight it appeared clear that startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community. Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 128

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Eighty some pages later I realized that a) I had some great war stories as a good marketeer and failed CEO, b) I’d have to pay my wife and kids to read them, c) the three of them were probably the entire total available market, and d) when I looked at what I had done and what other entrepreneurs had done at their startups, that there was a pattern.

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Redemption Silicon Valley RSS California 127

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan realized that the traditional centralized management structures (like General Motors had in 1920) were poor fits for the management of GM’s already diverse product lines. The idea was to keep customers coming back to General Motors over time to upgrade to a better brand as they became wealthier. auto market with 60% of the U.S.

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

APRIL 16, 2013

Freemium is not customer development Just imagine how much you’ll learn once you have 1,000 real, active users of the system: Everything from behavioral statistics (which features are actually used?) to democratic product development (voting on which features customers would like to see next?).

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Marketing Viral Campaign Business Model 318

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Build the best product at the best price and your options are limitless.

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Guy Nirpaz

APRIL 8, 2010

The motivation behind the move varies, however, one clear motive is customer demand. In addition, I’ve used lean practices to run a product development for years now. Lean is all about creating value for customers while reducing unnecessary waste along the process of doing so. Guy Nirpaz Blog. All rights reserved.

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Java RSS Lean 45

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. Great for visualizing work of product development. agile product management. agile product management and Scrum tool. agile product management and Scrum tool. Agile project management tool collaborative product life-cycle. Codeacademy. Steve Blank.

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Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Failures, pivots , and crappy minimum viable products are generally elided. You are the “hits&# that websites crave, the followers and the RSS subscribers. Failures, pivots , and crappy minimum viable products are generally elided. You are the “hits&# that websites crave, the followers and the RSS subscribers.

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San Francisco Lean PR Metrics 167

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

Building Product 2. Product/Metrics (70%/30% time) * Get your product activation (sign-up + meaningful action) to 60% * then, Get your product retention to 20% weekly. Would it be a good idea clubbing all the other products / services under 1 venture, because some of them are totally unrelated. I just didn’t stop.

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Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 19, 2008

Of their early customers, about 1/3 of them turned out to be high school or middle school teachers. This wasnt an education product - it was a pretty surprising group to find using it. Lessons Learned is the best RSS source in my overflowing Newsgator Online account. What is customer development?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 20, 2009

Specially because of Twitter and this information overload, I think many people have been struggling to reduce the number of RSS feeds they actually follow (it is my case), so it´ll become easier for us to keep track of your writing even if we´re not reading those blogs that often. Eric, I do think you should cross-post them here.

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Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

Take a look at The App Store after the gold rush - FierceDeveloper : According to a recent BusinessWeek feature , the flood of new games, productivity tools and related iPhone software is making it difficult for the vast majority of apps to crack the consumer consciousness. Acqusition competition is how new apps get new customers.

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San Francisco Lean Retention SEM 68