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

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 420

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Different market opportunities present radically different startup risks and costs. The time to product and scale of investment is radically different than other startup markets.&# 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.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# Context here.)

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deal architect

JUNE 5, 2023

I shared in this post that our research agenda is tracking four large software and services markets – vertical “edge” applications, applications for fast-growing global economies, custom development using low and no-code tools and Generative and other AI. The interest.

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Generative AI Vertical Global Customer Development 284

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching. A match made in heaven? Not exactly. Are You Crazy Enough ?

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching. Customer Development Teaching' Not exactly.

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Customer Development Vertical Agile Lean 224

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 Developer Silicon Valley Customer 212

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. Let’s Fire Our Customers Part of the DNA of great entrepreneurs is a bias towards decisive and immediate action. Get it done, now.

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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. They never understood Market Type. Why does Market Type matter?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 196

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. What kind of objectives would a startup want or need for sales and marketing?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 215

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully-formed go to market function.”. A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. Organize events in your vertical. Customer Development.

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Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. steve Customer Development is Hard. « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on May 5, 2009 at 3:55 pm Said: [.] Order Here.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 139

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.

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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.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? No, not really.

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SVPG

AUGUST 30, 2013

This is not a new technique, but you may recognize it as the foundation of Customer Discovery and Customer Development. I''m talking about the power of a happy, reference customer. First, let''s be clear what it means to be a reference customer. Smart prospective customers worry about this as well.

Customer 65

Customer API Brazil Germany 65

Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Our first question was, did the total number of customers that had already bought products from our competitors and us represent a saturated market or the tip of the iceberg? In other words what was the Total Available Market (TAM) and how much of the market had been already served?

Silicon Valley 134

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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. Ultimately you want to see if you can find customers and a market for the product as specified – as early as possible.

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Cray’s first customers were the U.S. What Markets? At Ardent our hypothesis was that if we could build a desktop supercomputer powerful enough to run and display these numerical simulations there were enough customers to make this a big business. See the previous Ardent posts for context.) A supercomputer could be a 100x faster.

Silicon Valley 147

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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. I thought I was bright, aggressive and could do no wrong as a marketer. Silence descended across the conference table.

Silicon Valley 271

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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

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

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

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. His enthusiastic response was, “This will revolutionize marketing departments!”

Silicon Valley 225

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 225

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Why they were looking to me to run marketing wasn’t clear. They sold to a set of customers I knew nothing about. The company was the laughing stock of the Mac market. The two other players in the add-on graphics business, Radius and RasterOps, had a combined 90% market share. Why I was interested was equally obscure.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 146

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

JUNE 11, 2009

Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model.

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 219

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.

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Status Report At Ardent the marketing department was responsible for acquiring applications for our supercomputer. 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. This was my fault.

Silicon Valley 324

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

To do this they have to accomplish five things; 1) get deal flow – via networking and legwork, they identify likely industries, companies and teams with the potential for rapid growth (less than 10 years), 2) evaluate those companies and teams on the basis of technology, market opportunity, and team.

Silicon Valley 217

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 217

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

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

The company was founded to build games with embedded video to bring Hollywood stories, characters, and narratives to a market where “shoot and die” twitch games were in vogue. But underlying the company’s existence was a fundamental hypothesis we refused to see or test - customers would care if we did. They think the games stink.”

Silicon Valley 207

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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. The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. I just want to do strategy.”

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

Today, Grizzle is a full-service content marketing and SEO agency that provides B2B and SaaS companies end-to-end services. Here, I’ll show you the journey we took to finding our place in the market by testing, pivoting, and re-pivoting our serving offerings and value propositions so you can grow your agency faster, without fewer wrong turns.

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

At the same time we were educating the press , we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

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. has a large enough market that most U.S. ———-.

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