Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? Yet for every founder there are 10-20 other employees who take the near-equivalent risks in joining an early-stage company. Can you recognize and capitalize on them? Tenacious – can you keep going when everyone else gives up?

Cofounder 219

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

They sold to a set of customers I knew nothing about. After talking to its resellers and customers I realized that SuperMac was the only company that could be described as “fifth in a group of three.” They had an existing distribution channel and their dealers and customers thought they knew who the company was and what it stood for.

Silicon Valley 146

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Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc.

Silicon Valley 300

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

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. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.”

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that.

Vertical 128

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.

Silicon Valley 179

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers.

Technology 138

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Oh, and since it was not code compatible with anything, we were going to have to port all the key scientific applications our customers needed (as soon as we figured out who they were.) Personal supercomputer s meant yet again learning something completely new; new computer architectures, new applications and customers, new markets.

North Carolina 125

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David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. A number of analysts have particular focus on serving the customers of technology companies, e.g., Gartner and 451 Research.

Private Equity 60

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit.

Silicon Valley 128

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. No building, no money, no customers, no market? Who are the customers? These customer and market risks need to be translated into facts as soon as possible. Employ customer development.

Silicon Valley 212

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. And even more importantly, was there any way to reduce risk in early stage ventures? a customer before you try and build a business. familiar with Customer Development you should be.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me –“That’s a great hypothesis, do customers tell you that they’d buy your version if it was cheaper or on the web?

Silicon Valley 181

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Eighty some pages later I realized that a) I had some great war stories as a good marketeer and failed CEO, b) I’d have to pay my wife and kids to read them, c) the three of them were probably the entire total available market, and d) when I looked at what I had done and what other entrepreneurs had done at their startups, that there was a pattern.

Redemption 126

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Yet the processes that early-stage companies were using were identical to that of large corporations. Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery.

Silicon Valley 127

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. It may not be for you.

Silicon Valley 170

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. Next, who will the customers be and where will they be found?

Silicon Valley 260

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

So I got out out of the building to meet and understand our customers and distribution partners. 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.

Silicon Valley 139

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers. Your messages should have been pre-tested with prospects and existing customers way before you go to a show. If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department.

Silicon Valley 178

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

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. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Anybody else got some other ideas?&#

Silicon Valley 120

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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. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

Lean 244

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Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Intellectual Property At the next class I said, “You all ought to get out and start talking to customers on day one, and get early feedback on your idea. Don’t share the details of your manufacturing process with customers until you’ve locked up your intellectual property.” Just get out of the building.”

Vertical 149

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Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

Technology changes, culture changes, customer needs change, more agile competitors emerge, etc. Over the last 35 years venture capital has funded nimble new entrants (on a scale never imagined by Schumpeter ) who exist to exploit discontinuities in technology or customer behavior. However, no markets last forever.

Silicon Valley 164

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

Rather than a traditional VC pitch I suggested that they do something unconventional and tell the story of their journey in Customer Discovery and Validation. The heart of the Cafepress presentation is the “ Lessons Learned from our Customers ” section. Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me.

Venture Capital 209

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Luckily while I was teaching classes at headquarters, Zilog’s field application engineers (the technical engineers working alongside our salesmen) would work side-by-side with our large customers as they designed their systems with our chips. Customers The irony is that Zilog had no idea who would eventually become its largest customers.

Silicon Valley 175

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

In the real world, most business plans don’t survive the first few months of customer contact. And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan. MootCorp in particular has an impressive track record of putting early stage tech companies on the right path towards funding.

Business Plan 140

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Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

To a Hammer Everything Looks Like a Nail In hindsight my failure was that I executed to my strength – telling a compelling story – without actually listening to customer feedback. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to listen to customers. I had outsourced customer feedback and ignored the input.

Silicon Valley 122

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc. Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. And that’s just to get started. Let me know what you think.

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

But underlying the company’s existence was a fundamental hypothesis we refused to see or test - customers would care if we did. In the game business of the early 1990’s video was at best a brief narrative, a distraction you maybe watched once, not the core of the game. Our customers wanted to kill, shoot or hunt for something.

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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 7, 2009

College Dropouts - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison These guys realized that customers don’t ask for your transcript. Reply Jesse Farmer , on April 7, 2009 at 8:53 am Said: Customers don’t ask for your transcript. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] You just get successful.

Silicon Valley 327

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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. Did the customers know they had a problem?

Silicon Valley 172

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

And the same time we were also going to do all the other strategic stuff about pricing, positioning, promotion and customer discovery and validation to help engineering understand customer needs. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role.

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Lessons to Learn By the time I joined Ardent I thought I was an experienced marketer, but I’ll never forget my first real lesson in what it meant to understand customers and product/market fit. Get Out of My Company At the top of his lungs he screamed, “You don’t know a damn thing about what these customers need!

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