Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 13, 2012

The Japanese edition of The Startup Owner’s Manual hit the bookstores in Japan this week. I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with Customer Development in Japan. The result: great success of my third startup, a load balancing technology for web servers back in the late 1990’s.

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Japan Customer Development Developer Customer 238

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 24, 2022

When you have a startup, time and money are always at a premium. This blog post will discuss some of the most effective methods of promoting your startup. It will also offer tips on how to make the most of your marketing budgeting and successfully promote your startup. Develop a Strong Online Presence. All the best!

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Startup Social Media Audience Email 127

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

VC’s were no longer insisting that startups spend faster, and “swing for the fences”. It was a nuclear winter for startup capital.” ” Steve Blank, “Is the lean startup dead?” ” The Lean Startup movement started out of necessity. Agile Development: launch an MVP early and iterate quickly.

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Lean Startup Seed Capital Venture Capital 214

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2013

The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here.

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Lean Startup Venture Capital Business Model 326

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

Finally, I’ll write about 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. Three to six months after first customer ship, if Sales starts missing its numbers, the board gets concerned.

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Customer Development Startup Developer Silicon Valley 173

View from Seed

OCTOBER 22, 2015

The obvious answer we all give (and receive) in the startup community is to talk to people. Customer development” has become its own skill and body of knowledge, and there are some crucial nuances to understand up front before beginning your customer dev discussions. But how do you go about figuring out what people want?

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Customer Development Startup Customer Developer 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. However the Customer Development Model and the Lean Startup work equally well for startups on the web.

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Customer Development Startup Web Developer 167

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 22, 2014

If you can’t see the video click here Filed under: 2 Minute Lessons , Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Customer Development. 2 Minute Lessons Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan Customer Development'

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Startup Customer Development Video Developer 254

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation - how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.). Hawken students practicing Customer Discovery in a mall.

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Lean Startup Customer Development Silicon Valley 332

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Scalable startups are on a trajectory for a billion dollar market cap. 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. Building a Regional Startup Playbook. ———-.

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Startup Global Silicon Valley Business Model 333

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

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Customer Development Lean Startup Developer 167

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 9, 2018

If you’re a startup trying to disrupt an existing business you need to read The Fixer by Bradley Tusk and Regulatory Hacking by Evan Burfield. startups might run into an alphabet soup of federal regulatory agencies, for example; ATF , CFPB , DEA , EPA , FAA , FCC , FDA , FDIC , FERC , FTC , OCC , OSHA , SEC. In the U.S.

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Startup Marketing Government Business Model 315

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2014

This post follows directly on Steve’s earlier excellent post, Why Companies are not Startups. In this post, I want to share some new thoughts that build on Steve’s post, and connect them to Lean Startup methods. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a repeatable, scalable business model.

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Startup Business Model Lean Customer Development 324

Grasshopper Herder

SEPTEMBER 30, 2014

After I read Four Steps to the Epiphany, there was only one: Get out of the building and talk to customers! Lean Startups Product/Market Fit Customer Development experiment design survey' At LUXr, Janice Fraser introduced me to a whole new host of tools to gain insight such […].

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Lean Startup Customer Development Hosting 277

Steve Blank

JUNE 23, 2020

The pandemic has upended the business models of most startups and existing companies. As the economy reopens companies are finding that customers may have disappeared or that their spending behavior has changed. Swiss smart flooring startup Technis now helps supermarkets regulate the flow of shoppers.

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Customer Marketing Startup Business Model 436

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With Customers. How did we build startups in the past? How to Get, Keep and Grow Customers ? What is Customer Development. What is Customer Discovery and Why Do it? Customer Validation. Why Customer Development is done by founders. Jobs to be done.

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Lean Business Model Customer Development Startup 333

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2013

The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here.

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Lean Startup Venture Capital Business Model 220

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

This is a guest post by my Startup Owner’s Manual co-author Bob Dorf. While statistics are weak on startup success rates, the worst one I’ve seen suggests that 2 in 1000 venture backed startups will ever achieve $100-million or more in valuation. Can every startup skyrocket like Facebook or Square or Google?

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Startup Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 330

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Today every business organization from startup to large company uses the words “business model.” Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. Business Model Design Meets Customer Development.

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Business Model Customer Development Developer Customer 323

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. The goal of their startup in this stage becomes “getting funded.”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 228

Grasshopper Herder

JULY 17, 2012

Customer development is hard. It takes work to get it right and you'll always be improving your technique. Here are a few tips I like to keep in my head while I'm getting out of the building.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Lean 260

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

In the last few years we’ve recognized that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. We’re now learning that companies are not larger versions of startups. But paradoxically, in spite of all their seemingly endless resources, innovation inside of an existing company is much harder than inside a startup.

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Startup Business Model IRR Incubator 335

The Startup Magazine

FEBRUARY 21, 2020

There are many reasons why startups fail, and the difference between failure and startup success isn’t always product or service related. In general, successful startups do three major things: They understand who their customers are, what they want and clearly define the product or service Unique Selling Point(USP).

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Startup Entrepreneur Business Model Acquisition 115

Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Over the years we brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Startups in Bend.

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Silicon Valley Startup Oregon Venture Capital 298

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

What’s become apparent in the last few technology hype cycles is that for startups and their investors there is a short multi-year window of opportunity (at the Peak of Inflated Expectations) to sell a startup at an inflated price. Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development.

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Lean Startup Exit Strategy Silicon Valley 310

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We’ve been a startup for the past two years or so and we’ve come to a critical point on this crazy roller coaster ride. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. So how did Customer Development fail us?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Entrepreneur 196

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 17, 2021

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. For startups, social media and color printers have essentially replaced the need for external public relations and marketing services.

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Entrepreneur Cost Social Media Startup 403

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

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Customer Development Silicon Valley Developer Customer 159

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? —— When I wrote Four Steps to the Epiphany and the Startup Owners Manual , I believed that Life Sciences startups didn’t need Customer Discovery.

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Startup SBIR Lean Customer Development 290

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 4, 2012

I recently wrote about the 12 tips to building successful startup communities. I lived in London from 1997-2005 and for 6 of those years ran my startup based out of London. Everything I learned about startups I learned by making mistakes at my first one. I’m absolutely certain it is critical to any startup community.

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Startup Silicon Valley Community Detroit 350

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? One would think that designing a medical device would be a simple engineering problem, and startups would be emerging right and left. Life Sciences II – Medical Devices. Regulatory Issues.

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Startup Venture Capital Lean Early Stage 274

Grasshopper Herder

JANUARY 29, 2018

Have you thought about using Lean Startup to improve your sales process? The post B2B Sales: A Lean Startup Approach appeared first on GrasshopperHerder.com. The founder of Shipitwise reveals how he used lean principles to improve B2B sales.

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Lean B2B Startup Sales 166

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. Here’s one possible explanation – Job titles in a startup mean something different than titles in a large company. Startups Need Different Titles to Search For an Unknown Business Model.

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Startup Business Model Customer Development Hiring 307

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century entrepreneurship education fell into two categories: 1) starting small businesses and 2) starting high-growth, high-risk scalable startups. The case method and business plans are the antithesis of how entrepreneurs create startups. Neither cases nor business plans replicate the actual startup experience.

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Lean Startup Business Model Business Plan 378

Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2010

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. It reminded me of the differences in Customer Discovery between a scalable startup and a big company.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Startup 199

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition of why startups exist : a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. In your startup’s business model, the boxes will have specific details of your company’s strategy.

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Startup Business Model Silicon Valley Agile 333

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Startups are the search to find order in chaos. At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Steve Blank.

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Business Model Startup Agile Customer Development 293