Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. They are closing orders.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Amazon PostRank

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Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing says they had the fortitude to make quick decisions and stay the course not just because they’d observed how people were using the marketplace, but also because they’d spoken with hundreds of potential and past customers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. And of course, if I twitter about the workshop on a Friday afternoon, I won’t know if that had any impact until Monday – unless I want to be a pain and bother someone on their weekend. Great post and great ideas.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom and test the first key hypotheses of their business model: The Value Proposition. What sort of sales structure and salesforce does it require? This post is part three. Syllabus is here.

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Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 232

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2016

” They said, “It’s OK, I’m going to buy it once it’s for sale so I’ll be your first customer.” We did canning and food preservation workshops. But it just made sense to us that partners could be like an extended sales team before we could afford to have one. Jack : Right.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Morocco Arkansas 120

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 26, 2012

Massive conference update So about that conference : We’ve been announcing bit and pieces of the schedule, and today we’re pleased to publish the full program, below, including speakers, mentors, workshops, startup site visits and Ignite: Lean Startup. Gold and Platinum Pass holders can also attend deep-dive workshops on December 4.

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Lean San Francisco Houston Engineer 159

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Although customers didnt flock to this offering at first, we had enough of a developer program active to start recruiting early adopters to start creating 3D objects for sale in our catalog. That engine of creativity has led to a catalog of something like 2 million virtual goods authored by a hundred thousand developers.

Product Development 88

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2014

What’s customer development?) At this year’s Lean Startup Conference , Janice will give a full-day workshop on Lean Startup 101 , with hands-on exercises.) Our fall sale for conference tickets is the last price break for this year, and it ends on October 31st. What’s the story with pivots?). Register today.'

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. KISSmetrics building and empowering cross-functional teams to attack problems in their sales funnels via hypothesis testing. The result: a new idea I called The Lean Startup.

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Lean Entrepreneur Agile San Francisco 167

YoungUpstarts

NOVEMBER 20, 2013

It allows you to dispense with high-pressure sales tactics and get on with the business of truly serving customers. As president of Advanced Industrial Marketing, he conducts training workshops in every region of the world. Professionalisms B2B blueprinting customer development Dan Adams product development product planning'

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Product B2B Product Development Developer 251

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

This makes lean supply chains more robust in the face of the unexpected: if sales suddenly dry up, they are stuck with less unsold inventory and simultaneously have less debt to service. Are the engineers in the customer development team allowed to push quick and dirty "prototypes" to production? Eric, great post.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Also, our stuff was pretty much useless to our customers if it wasnt full featured AND reliable. Of course, the sales folks had new features as their #1 priority. We ended up rethinking our entire product development process, top to bottom, start to finish. Top managements #1 was usually ROI. What a freaking mess.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Because this language may lead you to believe this concept is for enterprise sales only, I thought Id walk you through an example from the world of consumer electronics. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? One of my favorite gadgets at home is the Harmony Universal Remote.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

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? Is that a lot? I have given more than two-dozen paid speeches this year – is that a lot? Is that good? Amazon PostRank

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

Think, for example, about the way we talk about sales and customer development and the idea of ‘getting out of the building.’ Impatient investors and team members give little support to a founder trying to do Customer Development to verify or modify that idea. They often look on this as a waste of time.

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Silicon Valley Lean Puerto Rico Japan 168

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 16, 2010

It requires separating the product launch from the marketing launch (see Dont Launch ) as well as other staple Lean Startup tactics: minimum viable product, split-testing, customer development and the pivot. Third, SlideShare started holding sales calls with large companies to learn what would prompt them to buy the enterprise version.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Analytics Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 27, 2015

—– In a recent workshop with a large company focused on the Innovation@50x process, I mentioned that founders and intraprenuers operate more like artists than accountants – on day one they see something no one else does. Customer Development. Say what? I kicked myself knowing that I should have thought of Pixar.

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Founder Lean Hawaii Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 19, 2009

But instead of spending the time and money to develop products on spec, TPGTEX creates mocked-up webpages that list the features of a potential new product -- such as a system for making radio-frequency identification, or RFID, labels -- along with its price. The key ideas are customer development , the pivot , MVP, and root cause analysis.

San Francisco 137

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 137

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 30, 2008

This can take the form of a traditional sales pipeline or a registration-activation-revenue chart. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Take a look and let me know what you think. Amazon PostRank

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Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment DC 121

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Answering that question is what Im striving to do on this blog (and at future webcasts and workshops ). Register here.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Duct Tape Marketing

MARCH 1, 2016

A channel for lead generation purposes is simply a broad way to gain access to your prospective audience – so referral generation is a channel, sales is a channel, SEO is a channel, and speaking is a channel – and there are countless ways to master every channel. This is not a sales presentation; it’s an education and value add tool.

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Lead Generation Channel Partner Campaign 28

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. As the experiments progressed, day-in-day-out we werent making sales. We started to put in simple data probes at each of these key stages in our customers usage of the product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. It’s the same process as sales and dating, and I know how to do both, well, at least sales… So, how hard can this be? Workshops. -->. Media Training.

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Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

In particular, a marketing launch can help you do three things (courtesy, as is most of my marketing advice, of The Four Steps to the Epiphany ): Drive customers into your sales pipeline. Do some Customer Development instead. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

Of course, the real thanks should go to a startup - Gogo Inflight Internet - that I was lucky enough to meet at a recent workshop. I started my last company with 100% off-shore resources because I could never have completed Customer Development at a reasonable cost of money or regulatory burden had I employed US Citizens.

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DC Washington San Francisco SBIR 90

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo New York New York, NY Nov 19 The Lean Startup at MIT Boston, MA Nov 20 Lunch workshop at Dogpatch Labs Boston, MA Dec 17 Lean Startup Cohort program begins San Francisco, CA KISSmetrics KISSmetrics is loading. Amazon PostRank

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Software Review Technical Review Part-Time VPE San Francisco 94

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2008

You do get the beneift of total control of your content, so you can guarantee your customers a quality experience. However, virtual goods is a hits-driven business, which means you must constantly figure out what kind of content your customers want. No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Amazon PostRank

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2009

This is especially useful in situations, like most B2B businesses, where the total number of customers is likely to be small. This case study illustrates one company’s attempt to do customer development by testing their vision with customers before writing a single line of code. Oh, this is just a Photoshop file?

San Francisco 144

San Francisco Customer Wiki Lean 144

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

I wrote about this challenge for iPhone developers, in an essay on retention competition : the battle over what icon the user will click when they go to the home screen. At that point, theres no opportunity for marketing or sales; the battle is already won or lost in the persons mind. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Viral 140

Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

- SoCal CTO , January 13, 2010 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches - A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks , July 11, 2010 9 Reasons Why Many Smart People Go Nowhere - Life Beyond Code , March 29, 2010 No Accounting For Startups - Steve Blank , February 22, 2010 Startup Advice In Exactly Three Words - #StartupTriplets - OnStartups , January (..)

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

The class was designed to teach educators (and the adjunct entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. This concept has consumed me since I returned from the workshop.

Delaware 299

Delaware Lean Entrepreneur Advisory Board 299

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

The class was designed to teach educators (and the adjunct entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. This concept has consumed me since I returned from the workshop.

Delaware 191

Delaware Lean Entrepreneur Advisory Board 191

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

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San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 28, 2009

This is usually exacerbated by zealous sales persons who oversell the features, or even more typical, promise completely new features. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? No departments The Five Whys for Startups (for Harvard Business R. Amazon PostRank

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 79