Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

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Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

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?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money. Would you mind sharing them?

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 125

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 122

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.

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North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

For this startup we had assembled some of the best and brightest hardware and software engineers in the computer industry. Motioning to our VP of Sales, he ordered: “Go with him and get him in front of customers, and both of you don’t come back until you can tell us something we don’t know.” And he was smiling.

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Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 271

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. The software was idiot proof.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) ———— T o: Marketing Department From: Steve Subject: Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters Generating Leads Ownership If your company is going to a show to generate leads, then sales owns the show.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 128

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? And since the card was useless without any application software, what other software products did they use on it? I wanted to understand how customers bought our products. I knew we were selling through a multi-level indirect sales channel.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 185

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

I grabbed one of each piece of literature, stuffed into my bag, and wandered through the exhibit hall looking at other hardware and petroleum software companies. Intelligence As I leafed through the Cray sales material, a glossy magazine with the headline Cray Channels jumped out of the pile.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 147

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. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Are These Your Slides?

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

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Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. I walked into the VP of Sales’ office and with my knees trembling, I politely asked for the job. I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One.

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Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. The companies I was involved with as board member, such as Inxight Software (sold to BOBJ), were living on a high through the hype phase and had to relearn and retool themselves to make it on scarce resources and raw talent.

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F. It’s been a very, very difficult journey.

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Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales. is an AI bot which helps companies refine their sales pitch to VCs. Sebastian Soler recently launched Knowledge.vc , which uses software and machine learning to enhance deal sourcing and diligence for VC firms. Pitchbot.vc

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Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. 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. That’s when things went south.

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Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 205

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 260

Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) As the company gets larger and a large professional sales organization kicks in, its second priority is to generate qualified leads. you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 178

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2009

Traveling around the country had helped me begin to understand how these customers currently did their work, what journals they read, where they got their funding, what other software they ran on their machines, etc. I came back to the company and described the day-in-the-life of each type of customer.

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Silicon Valley RSS Vertical California 136

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Revisiting the Software Design Manifesto (and what. Is that a lot? Is that good?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

I put together a one-page website, a list of 100 people to reach out to, and a cold email script that would make seasoned sales professionals cringe. I know this language sounds formal and stuffy, but high-ticket service sales cycles are long. Choose to expand vertically or horizontally. Most B2B buyers know this.

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Software By Rob

JULY 15, 2011

is a tool that helps you edge into customer development. It’s a free tool put together by Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah as a way for product owners to easily survey their customers using pre-written questions. But Analytics tells me that that only 37% of our sales come from search engine traffic. Photo by Eleaf.

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Customer Analytics Vertical Sales 55

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. >> The article and HN are concerned with software. Our idea is boring and not revolutionary.

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Stealth Technical Review Startup Software Review 41