Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

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. startups ignore the rest of the world until they scale in their own country. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development.

Global 335

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

The rest of the progress report sounded just like this. PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). Me: How are we doing on the Nastran port?

Silicon Valley 324

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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 164

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In the Fall of 2008, the credit crisis wiped out mergers and acquisitions as a path to liquidity as M&A collapsed with the rest of the market. The formula for exits was a variation of the formula they used in the Internet bubble, morphing into: brand, hype and sell the company. So what’s left?

Silicon Valley 217

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

You can imagine the rest of the conversation; my sounding reluctant to let our own tests outside our building, the magazines begging us to let them have them, and finally a deal gets struck where we let the benchmarks out to the test labs of these magazines under their own name “The Potrero Benchmark Suite” without attribution to us.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Instead of focusing on “technical specs&# like the rest of the category, we are redefining to Information Delivery as the category with time/cost to Actionable Info as the metric, which is something we can compete on very well. Reply Dave Goulden , on March 26, 2009 at 11:04 pm Said: I love the redefinition of the market.

Silicon Valley 141

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We We need your decision now because we are about to spend $50,000 on new collateral.”

Silicon Valley 185

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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 the rest is history. I was chief engineer and developer of both those radars while I worked for ITT Electro-Physics Lab in Hyattsville, MD. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

Silicon Valley 171

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Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

A great vacation with my wife wasn’t going to make up for being AWOL from home the rest of the year. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime. Everything else flows from that.

Entrepreneur 276

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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.

Silicon Valley 184

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. so at least some parts are being run by people who know what they are doing.

Sales 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. BUT, they moved into a nice office off of Sand Hill Road.

Silicon Valley 205

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

And the rest of the advice on this blog is irrelevant. And even if you did it’s the wrong focus, and time spent for a startup 2. If winning $5-10K is your goal, you’re not a scalable startup, just a small business.

Business Plan 140

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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 297

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Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

Our receptionists’ desk was built on the wing of a WWII P-51 fighter plane, and the rest of the office décor matched. Since we were the hip, new, edgy, “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” video game company (more about “ big hat, no cattle ” startups in subsequent posts,) our office obviously had to match the image.

Silicon Valley 128

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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. But for the rest of us, who create content because we care passionately about having an impact on the world, we need to rethink the process by which we do it. For established media empires, this is a scary fact.

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 247

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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 327

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

My way of explaining our support and service role to the marketing department was that: Sales is the sharp end of the stick, and marketing at best, is the stick. But while the sales team works for commission, the rest of the employees have equity (stock) in the company. No one was confused after that. Who’s on the Sharp End?

Silicon Valley 126

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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.) Yet if turned my head the other way, I’d stare out at a landscape that was untouched by humans. It shunned publicity.

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

Our president picked up on the momentum and asked me what I needed from the rest of the exec team to fix this debacle. I replied: “This is really important for our success as company and I’m really at a loss why customers didn’t respond the way we expected. It was so out of character, people were shocked. True? .&#

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

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? Gary Hoover Reply Michael F.

Silicon Valley 156

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Be sure to look at a floor plan before you choose your site. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions.

Silicon Valley 178

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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 195

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. However, the mistake would be to confuse the interest in consumer facing companies with mass interest in the rest of corporate America. In an existing or resegmented market, this may include branding and product line extensions. It may happen, but its not there yet. (As

Silicon Valley 134

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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. The trips gave them a sense that the rest of the country and the world was not Silicon Valley and that their lives were not the norm. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. Never miss an event.

Entrepreneur 331

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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. >> Instead you will literally have to hire guards to keep the desperate customers from knocking down your door.

Stealth 41

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