Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) That’s 10x what many websites convert.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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 129

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 129

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

First of all, most of your customers don’t know or care who any of these venture firms are. For customers t he venture firm brands don’t matter. Andy came to Silicon Valley in 1983 to work for Regis McKenna and help Steve Jobs launch the Macintosh. Filed under: Customer Development.

Washington 289

Washington Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder 289

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. At first glance, the diagram, which illustrates the process of getting a new product into the hands of waiting customers, appears helpful and benign.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. Carpe Diem. We’re now in the second Internet bubble. Rules For the New Bubble: 2011 -2014.

Internet 334

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

First of all, most of your customers don’t know or care who any of these venture firms are. For customers t he venture firm brands don’t matter. Andy came to Silicon Valley in 1983 to work for Regis McKenna and help Steve Jobs launch the Macintosh. Filed under: Customer Development.

Washington 120

Washington Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Cofounder 120

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 185

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 185

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Im not offering extensive studies or research to support this conclusion; the evidence from my peers right here in the innovation capital of America, Silicon Valley, is absolutely overwhelming. Asked to help, I am confident that Silicon Valley and every other innovation center will step up. They are nerds.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

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. carry on reading.

Silicon Valley 169

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Dinner in a Strange Land When I was in my mid 20′s working at ESL, I was sent overseas to a customer site where the customers were our three-letter intelligence agencies. Is this behavior an outlier or is it the norm in the PR industry? It’s part of growing up but can happen at any age.

Silicon Valley 191

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Our “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” story played great in Silicon Valley, they ate it up in Hollywood, and the business press tripped over themselves to talk to us. 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

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Ive previously written about the advantages of having a pathetically small number of customers , and how to get started with customer segmentation. it seemed time to return to the subject of investigating who my customers are. Thats a common pattern to gaining customer insight. Customer knows they have a problem.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Or offer some real insights into our customers? It wasn’t a lack of competence or skill in her job; it was just that as far as she was concerned, her job had no connection to the rest of marketing, our customers or our ultimate success as a company. “We Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” An in-depth reseller survey?

Silicon Valley 192

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ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

OrangeScape positions itself as an Application Platform As A Service (APaaS) provider, and has some marquee customers in India including Unilever, Citibank, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Sterlite. I asked him to create a couple of success stories to validate the assumptions, and then do a very focused PR campaign in the blowing center industry.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur India Silicon Valley Massachusetts 114

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. Our potential customers didn’t seem to be calling for Hollywood stories, characters and narrative. Our customers wanted to kill, shoot or hunt for something. That’s OK, because we knew better.

Silicon Valley 212

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 212

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 26, 2012

KQED Forum: LIVE at 10am PST this Wednesday Nov 28 When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I used to have a pretty short commute. Plus, I have very cool conference updates (our full conference program + more than 300 simulcast locations!) and a chance to win free tickets, if you keep reading.

Lean 159

Lean San Francisco Houston Engineer 159

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Announce a new product, start its PR campaign, and engage in buzz marketing activities. Marketing launch) Make a new product available to customers in the general public. Worse, if you are not geared up to make the best use of those customers when the launch sends them your way, its a pretty big waste. Help you raise money.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

ESL sent me overseas to a secret site run by one of the company’s “customers.” And we were using thousands of chips in a configuration no rational commercial customer could imagine or afford. All You Can Read Without a Library Card It was 1978. Nothing I would work on in the next 30 years was as bleeding edge.

Silicon Valley 273

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 273

crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 15, 2013

Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Money matters: why women founders struggle in Silicon Valley | The Verge – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Paid Search: Are You Wasting Your Money? – [link].

Social Media 105

Social Media Small Business Design Media 105

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

A description of the problem you’re solving for your customers, and your solution to the problem, which is usually your product or service. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

Small Business and Startups: Slice & Dice Your Customer Service Data | crowdSPRING Blog - [link]. Is The Only Purpose of Customer Service To Change Feelings? How Customers evaluate your product | StartupCFO – [link]. Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) | Customer Development Labs - [link].

Social Media 93

Social Media Small Business Design Media 93

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

And then, at my first Silicon Valley startup , I watched friends get laid off in successive waves as it started to fail. We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other. Instead, lets focus on building companies that matter , on creating real value for customers, and learning.

San Francisco 94

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 94

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program. 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. But sales came first. (By

Silicon Valley 127

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techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

Especially if you aren’t from around Silicon Valley. pretty much sums everything up well, but – let’s be honest here – if you live outside Silicon Valley, you are going to be at odds, because the rest of the world hasn’t yet caught up with this tech start-up thing.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 20, 2011

Product management and customer development, KISSmetrics. rfan622 How Listening to Customers Helped Us Raise $700K in Seed Funding Mariya Genzel. One caveat: if you come by, you are automatically volunteering to be subjected to some intense customer development. Also: booze. Co-founder, Backblaze.

Czech Republic 114

Czech Republic Costa Rica Brazil Romania 114

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Launch with a PR blitz, including mentions in major mainstream publications. Here are a few: We know what customers want. By hiring experts, conducting lots of focus groups, and executing to a detailed plan, the company became deluded that it knew what customers wanted. Stealth is a customer-free zone.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

signup, upgrade, trial pricing Zuora – online subscription management FeeFighters – find the cheapest credit card processors HealPay – Collections made easy Customer Support Tender – support, knowledgebase tool for your site GetSatisfaction - conversations between companies / customers.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

There are many articles by many experts ( myself included ) extolling the virtues of listening to customers. In fact, there are so many of these propaganda pieces that this question might naturally cross your mind: if listening to customers is so great, why do we need so much propaganda? We did not take this step lightly.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158