Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products for the Macintosh.

Silicon Valley 146

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I’m a software engineer by trade, so I’m always interested in some better way to do things, whether they are in software or in business processes or organizations. 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.

Silicon Valley 125

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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.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

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. The Novelty effect?

Video 164

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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. Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference? Sounds like handspring.

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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.

Silicon Valley 217

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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.

North Carolina 125

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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?

Silicon Valley 225

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

But we knew something they didn’t; the total available market for color graphics boards was measurable by looking at an adjacent market, the color desktop publishing software market. Facts are the rock on which you build your strategy and tactics In a startup second-hand facts are almost as useless as opinions.

Silicon Valley 134

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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. Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own.

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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.

Private Equity 60

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. this may be a useful read. Write it down and keep it in a tradeshow handbook for those who will follow.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” The reaction from our software guys was a little less kind. “Are All I had done was proudly go out and get customer input. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

MBA or Domain Expert Years later when I was running marketing departments I came up with a heuristic that replicated my own hire: in a technology company it’s usually better to train a domain expert to become a marketer than to train an MBA to become a domain expert. Thanks Steve! So the ask is made — shall it be given?

Silicon Valley 120

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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.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. But the same technologies that make life difficult for traditional marketers also offer them unprecedented new opportunities.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This required convincing software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. – was his job.

Silicon Valley 324

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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.

Silicon Valley 139

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources. I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters&# memo as a board member after I saw our company at a trade show.

Silicon Valley 178

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. The guidelines I had originally proposed to my students worked for enterprise software or Web 2.0 Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

Vertical 149

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 244

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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.

Customer 420

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. Now he wanted to go off start his own company.

Silicon Valley 120

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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? Were our products a small part of their life or large? How important was the card to them getting their own job done?

Silicon Valley 185

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Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. link] [link] I guess you could call it the “Continuous Wave Radio&# technology period. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C. Who would have known?

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

Stealth 41

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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

JUNE 29, 2009

It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) I was living the dream – working 80 hour weeks and all the technology I could drink with a fire hose.) I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

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. Relying on client development alone will give you only part of the picture.

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PR B2B Lean Audience 120

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.

Cofounder 208

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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. I left ESL and the black world for a career in startups; semiconductors, supercomputers, consumer electronics, video games and enterprise software. I was in between the two thinking of this movie scene.

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 22, 2009

Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets , and with my team of vertical marketers , I thought I had achieved absolution and redemption. But there was one fatal flaw.

Silicon Valley 172

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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.

Silicon Valley 136

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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. military realized that our advantage over the Soviet Union was in silicon, software and systems.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

Out of Stanford Business School she went to work for Apple as an evangelist and then joined Ansa Software , the developer of Paradox, a Mac-database. My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. My wife knew a bit about startups. I looked at my kids and never went back. It takes two.

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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. 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. Customer development isn’t just for [.]

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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. Ardent 3: Supercomputer Porn « Steve Blank (tags: customer-development product-management startup) [.]

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