Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.) Where Are the Customers? Product Development Diagram 1.

Customer Development 244

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 12, 2018

Robust startup economies are popping up in communities all over the country, proving that entrepreneurs can succeed outside of Silicon Valley. flexibility, camaraderie, close collaboration with company leadership, building something new), along with the benefits of your location – specifically for those outside of Silicon Valley (i.e.

Hiring 100

Hiring Technical Review Silicon Valley Due Diligence 100

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2015

We had 130 students in 30 teams who got out of the classroom and did 2154 customer interviews in 5 days – a remarkable effort for 120 hours. Those bemoaning the dearth of women founders in Silicon Valley might want to see if there is a real disparity between the coasts or if it is just my selection bias? If it’s real why?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley New York City New York Venture Capital 120

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.

Customer 216

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 216

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

I think customer feedback comes in a very unstructured manner, hence it is difficult to apply an algorithm on it. to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. This is where it becomes an art as it requires skill (entrepreneurial?) Order Here.

Customer Development 128

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 128

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 23, 2023

At a large company, sales usually means someone else has done the broad shaping for a potential customer. Customer Success roles : This is akin to handling a source. You make sure the customer is happy and keeps buying, preferably more. Security roles : Some ex-Agency people gravitate to roles in security.

Government 234

Government Advisory Board Salary Sales Cycle 234

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Management 101.

China 327

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 327

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 4, 2020

Though the trend in the startup world seems to be relocating to Silicon Valley (a choice that some angel investors and ven­ture capitalists now call mandatory) and knocking on the doors of venture capital, this path doesn’t make sense for all businesses, and it’s not acces­sible to many entrepreneurs because of their life circumstances.

Entrepreneur 205

Entrepreneur Venture Capital Silicon Valley Bandwidth 205

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 4, 2018

The Silicon Valley-oriented technology press outlets don’t cover us because we’re not in San Francisco, even though we’re more successful than most of the startups they cover. That revenue is in on 75,000 customers, earned through the hard work of 500 employees across six offices on three continents. Period, full-stop.

Engineer 152

Engineer Revenue San Francisco Security 152

YoungUpstarts

MAY 2, 2018

Business systems, working conditions, staff behaviour, interactions between staff and customers all come under scrutiny. Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is a comedy series which follows the lives of a computer programmer and his geeky friends as they try to take advantage of the high tech gold rush. The Empire.

Entrepreneur 176

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley New York City Incubator 176

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

by Bill Lee, author of “ The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset “. No one can truly understand your customers or genuinely share their interests unless she is a customer herself. Your most powerful growth engine is your existing customer. Highly trained salespeople.

Customer 154

Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

I learned this the hard way, when I left IBM a few years ago to share what I had learned with the exciting world of startups in Silicon Valley. Luckily, I had always been a “hands-on” professional, and I had learned the pragmatics of people leadership, marketing, management tools, and funding.

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley Social Media Software Review Leadership 140

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.) To a person they became passionate evangelists and effective marketers.

Engineer 221

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 221

Startup Professionals Musings

JUNE 3, 2023

According to the International Business Innovation Association ( InBIA ), there are over 2,000 of these locations worldwide, and new online versions springing up all over the place, like Founders Space in Silicon Valley. I believe their competitive advantage is their top on-site leadership, exclusivity, and connections to investors.

Incubator 231

Incubator Silicon Valley North America Small Business Administration 231

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a broad range of markets and the way we look at it is pretty simple – the deals fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.”

Vertical 162

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 162

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Of course “copy” is too strong a word. Management 101.

China 219

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 219

Startup Professionals Musings

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

According to the International Business Innovation Association ( InBIA ), there are over 2,200 of these locations worldwide, and new online versions springing up all over the place, like Founders Space in Silicon Valley. I believe their competitive advantage is their top on-site leadership, exclusivity, and connections to investors.

Incubator 398

Incubator Silicon Valley North America Startup 398

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? Since I was heading a marketing department, not acting as an individual contributor, I needed to teach all of marketing the importance of customer data.

Silicon Valley 147

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 147

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 10, 2023

Every business organization, large or small, has a variety of individual and team member types that factor into your ability to innovate and change the business to meet evolving customer needs and competition. He brings over 25 years of experience with Silicon Valley leadership companies in highlighting winners and losers.

Silicon Valley 240

Silicon Valley Lean Leadership Analytics 240

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. By 1961 its customers now included our intelligence agencies.

Silicon Valley 194

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 194

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. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

Silicon Valley 253

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 253

crowdSPRING Blog

JULY 10, 2014

These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! It’s getting harder to tell what’s a real Silicon Valley startup and what’s a parody – crowdspring.co/1k05eDQ. Everyone in SaaS Needs to Do Customer Support.

Social Media 97

Social Media Small Business Design Silicon Valley 97

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 165

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 165

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 5, 2022

Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to work and learn for many years in both the corporate environment (IBM), as well as the exploding Silicon Valley startup environment of the 90’s. Businesses require people relationships, to find the right team, investors, contract vendors, and attract customers.

Silicon Valley 292

Silicon Valley Viral Finance Leadership 292

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 307

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 307

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

In it Shackleton defined courage and leadership. He’s as good as any startup CEO in Silicon Valley. Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. Corporate elephants can dance.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 237

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 11, 2020

It’s not leadership. The military has three of the four pieces of the puzzle you need: strategy, access to technology, leadership. Leadership was not the problem. Strategy, technology, leadership – those were fine. Not just in the military, but also in Silicon Valley, where it dooms otherwise successful companies.

Technical Review 361

Technical Review Taiwan Technology Design 361

YoungUpstarts

JUNE 16, 2011

Read on for a few leadership mistakes that put your team in danger of failing elegantly—along with some remedies to get them back into the winner’s mindset. One CEO was constantly entertaining requests from his sales force for changes to the company’s product line—change orders—in response to “customer requests.”

Leadership 145

Leadership Silicon Valley Demand Sales 145

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. Get customers first.

Cofounder 229

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 229

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter. It did not mean building a startup into a company to flip or hype on the market with no earnings or revenue, but building a company that had paying customers. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

Silicon Valley 235

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 235

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 14, 2011

They are leveraging the same kinds of new technology, management thinking, and big data to improve lives that we routinely use here in Silicon Valley. We saw lots of examples of the " concierge MVP " technique, where an entrepreneur solves customer problems manually, by hand, before automating the solution.

DC 167

DC CTO Hire Fractional CTO Silicon Valley 167

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. and “What did customers think of your prototype?”

Silicon Valley 204

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 204

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 143

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 143

crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 8, 2018

Silicon Valley has dominated the U.S. Despite repeated efforts, only a few cities outside the Valley (New York and Boston) have historically had the critical mix of VC funding, network, and talent to fuel vibrant startup centers. cities (outside of Silicon Valley and the East Coast), to build your startup.

United States 113

United States Las Vegas San Francisco Denver 113

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 155

Silicon Valley RSS California Video 155

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

He previously founded N&N Investments LLC, a real estate investment holding company; and is a program leader and fellow of the Startup Leadership Program. . And most importantly, you have your customers that you want to sell your product or service to. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Ohio Columbus Entrepreneur 120

Startup Professionals Musings

NOVEMBER 11, 2020

One of the most successful incubators is Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. Here you need a team, people with disparate but complementary skills bonded by your leadership, to ship product and go live. Here is where you learn to listen and communicate with people and customers.

Entrepreneur 348

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Incubator Merger 348