Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted. What a great idea.

Customer Development 283

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

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 243

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 243

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.

Customer Development 231

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 231

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. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

Customer Development 226

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 226

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) 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. Reply Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Order Here.

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 126

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 210

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 210

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.)

Engineer 214

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 214

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 141

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 141

crowdSPRING Blog

AUGUST 16, 2012

Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account , I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design , web design , startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Want to Win The Competition For Customers?

Social Media 92

Social Media Small Business Design Media 92

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 228

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 228

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 157

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 157

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 218

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 218

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 195

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 195

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.

Customer Development 223

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 223

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It’s important to invest in good architecture so that your website will scale once customers arrive. If you make that investment, and then customers arrive, and the site stays up, most companies will reward the people who built the architecture and, thus, prevented the scaling problems. How upset will those customers be?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

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. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 124

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 124

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 8, 2023

Consider what followed since November: New foundational models, more efficient ways of training models etc An explosion of open source models, the rise of HuggingFace Breakthrough research across voice, video, text, multi modality, etc Billions of dollars invested in thousands of startups at the application layer of generative AI.

Generative AI 78

Generative AI ChatGPT Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 78

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 305

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 305

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 243

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 243

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 133

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 133

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 227

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 227

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

Imagine you want to store data about customers, each of whom has "last name" field in your database. For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. Customer data is normally partitioned according to customer id. What about log data about customers? Easy to understand.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. After more customer interviews, we have shifted our market type hypothesis to- entering an existant market. Our friends who run the state park surrounding our ranch will join all of us for Thanksgiving dinner.

Silicon Valley 145

Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 145

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2020

.” You’ve diplomatically explained to the client that they really should be using custom photography, but they insist that you find a “better/cheaper representation online.” Here’s the problem: Every other poor schmuck in every other vertical has used the exact…same…photograph.

Stock 71

Stock Software Review Arizona Technical Review 71

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 128

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 128

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Cray’s first customers were the U.S. 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. I concluded that my first job was to understand what Cray’s markets, customers and applications.

Silicon Valley 158

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 158

VC Cafe

DECEMBER 1, 2022

All the videos from the event , as well as our newly published landscape of the UK startups building the Metaverse can be found here. This video is a short excerpt from my panel on the opportunities for brands and platforms in the Metaverse. Video copyright, Taylor Wessing ; automated video summary credit: Munch ).

Generative AI 88

Generative AI Vertical Early Stage PR 88

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 128

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 128

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!

Silicon Valley 281

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 281

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 137

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. I asked Peter what kind of company he had in mind and was surprised and dismayed by the answer, “I want to make video games.”

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Customers will get to consume the content they want, and support the producers of that content directly, rather than having to rely exclusively on intermediaries. Now, helping potential customers discover new things they might like is the job of the discipline of marketing. There are just too many of them out there.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Oh, and we had no installed customer base. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers. So much so, I took a Customer Development approach to my startup, which I wrote up as a Case Study for the Google Group Lean Startup Circle.

Silicon Valley 330

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 330

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.

Silicon Valley 290

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 290

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. If you’ve never seen Eric’s Lean Startup presentation, take a few minutes to at least watch his part. It starts at ~40:30 in the video. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking.

Customer Development 147

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 147

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 141

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 141

steveblank.com

JULY 8, 2011

Poplytics – online surveys and analytics AskYourTargetMarket – market research surveys SurveyMonkey - granddaddy of on-line surveys Amazon Mechanical Turk – you can set up a question and get answers PickFu – A/B testing $5 for 50 opinions Collaboration Dropbox – store, sync, and, share files online.

Software Review 110

Software Review Startup Silicon Valley Analytics 110