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

APRIL 20, 2009

By the late 1930′s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management. And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies.

Silicon Valley 270

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

One of the times I screwed this up it left a legacy of 25 years of questionable design in microprocessor architecture. 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. Are you out of your !? *x!

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

Yet startup companies have traditionally used this model to manage and pace not only engineering but also non-engineering activities. The flaw in this thinking is that “first customer ship&# is simply the date when engineering thinks they “finished” the 1.0 Product Development Diagram 1. release of the product.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 238

ConversionXL

JUNE 30, 2019

Knowing what the competitors are doing—how they’re thinking about the market, which tactics they’re using, how they’re crafting messages and design—can make all the difference in the battle for customers. Often, the layout is something their web designer came up without doing a thorough analysis or testing. (In

SEO 126

SEO Conversion Analytics Design 126

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

In the past, we invested in brilliant architecture, code reuse, refactoring, modular design, etc. Imagine you hear from an engineer that they are worried that a certain payment subsystem is unreliable, and will therefore double-charge some customers. To a lot of smart engineers, that sounds crazy.

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend. Our vision was that just as the PC was revolutionizing the business market, we were going to do the same for scientists and engineers.

North Carolina 125

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 125

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl. Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other? Now every engineer can have their own office. Stay hungry, stay lean.

Silicon Valley 205

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 10, 2021

Except it does it without relying on organic search engine optimization to make an impact. And the more of them your website has, the higher it will rank in search engines, giving you more traffic. For your advertising spend, you’re getting paid benefits and a boost to your search engine marketing campaigns.

Advertising 131

Advertising Cost Customer PR 131

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

At Dribbble, we stumbled into ours – we were just building a side project, but it was a site for designers, and Dan is a designer with lots of recognition and credibility. If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. Stay lean for as long as possible. Be creative, and stay lean.

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Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Since I wasn’t an engineer, my contribution was around the team-building and fund raising. 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. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 179

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Their engineering teams didn’t have the expertise using off-the-shelf microprocessors (back then “real” computer companies designed their own instruction sets and operating systems.) Their engineers hated us. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

Technology 138

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 138

ConversionXL

MAY 11, 2017

Knowing what the competitors are doing – how they are thinking about the market, what tactics they are using, how they are crafting messages and design – can make all the difference in the battle for the customers’ mind share and conversions. The lean, aggressive ones do. Competitive Analysis for Design.

SEO 131

SEO Analytics Conversion Search 131

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Just like catching a bug in development is cheaper than fixing it once it has been released, confirming lack of customer demand prior to ramping up a sales engine is cheaper than finding out once you have a paid sales team. Blog at WordPress.com.

Venture Capital 209

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. Sharding for startups To support a single partitioning scheme is easy, especially if you design for it from the start. Ive taught everyone from hard-core programmers to scripters to HTML-designers to use it properly. to store it.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

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. would look in each of the verticals. Product Development – How do you engineer it? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? Time to Market – How long?

Vertical 122

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 122

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Simulation to Reduce Invention Risk If you’re in a vertical where “invention risk” is dominant, then you want to do everything you can to manage and reduce those risks. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that. You may have a set of hypothesis about them but you really don’t know.

Vertical 128

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 128

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. 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. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 8, 2009

Marketing is Heard From Engineering was discussing how sophisticated the graphics portion of our computer should be, debating cost and time-to-market tradeoffs of arcane details such as double-buffering, 24 versus 32-bits of color, alpha channels, etc. The conversation that day would become one of my professional watermarks.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 271

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project. In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR.

Video 164

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 164

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

We talked about some simple design rules and I remember him thanking me for coming, saying we were the only chip company who cared enough to call on him (little did he know.) Long gone from Zilog I saw the picture of the original Macintosh design team. I thought nothing about the meeting until years later.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000. So our people in the field could correct any egregious design advice I gave to customers who mattered. VP of Sales? Wait a minute. where am I?

Silicon Valley 175

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 175

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. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Silicon Valley 125

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Because of the vagaries of how floating point units in computers were designed, your average IBM mainframe of the day would take forever to run a simulation application. When I learned that Cray users would be giving papers at the Society of Petroleum Engineering conference in Denver the next day, I got on a plane to listen and learn.

Silicon Valley 147

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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

Seeing Both Sides

AUGUST 16, 2012

As we have seen with the recent speed bumps at highfliers like Groupon and Zynga, taking “lean startups” from foundation to creating sustainable, scalable, profitable business models is a very rare and special task. In founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer wanted to take his hard core engineering skills and apply them to vertical search in travel.

Part-Time VPE 54

Part-Time VPE Software Review Costa Rica Technical Review 54

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

—————- The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office is in the Terman Engineering Building.

Silicon Valley 180

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 180

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. Seven years later in 1971 ESL went public.

Silicon Valley 171

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 171

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Since there was very little documentation my time was split between the design engineers who built the system and the test and deployment team getting the system ready to go overseas. After I was done teaching each the day, I continued to write the operations manuals and work with the test engineers. (I Are You Single?

Agile 245

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 245

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. I had been teaching Z8000 design to customers for the last year and a half. I understand how our products were being used and why we won design-in’s over Intel or Motorola. In reality it would be another 20 years.) I also knew our customers.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Just like in the world of startups, we can start to use micro-scale pilot programs, executed in lean fashion, to gather real facts for making ROI decisions about new project investment. If they don’t, there are a new breed of lean startups who understand this deep in the bones ready to take their place. 12comments: Dougvs said.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer. I had no idea what I wanted to do next, and would get paid to think about it?

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

mobile.smashingmagazine.com

JANUARY 16, 2013

Web Design. Design Patterns. UI Design. Responsive Design , Strategy. Designing websites for smartphones is easy compared to retrofitting those already in place. Prior to the iPhone’s introduction in mid-2007, designers could rely on windows at least 700 pixels wide (if they ignored accessibility).

Mobile 101

Mobile HTML Flash Software Review 101

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Silicon Valley 259

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 259

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. We listed the editors, writers, what they had previously had written, deadlines, what the competitive products were, how our benchmarks stacked up, what “upgrades” our boards needed from engineering to win, etc.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford designed Klystrons producing 2½ Megawatts were manufactured by Varian and Litton would power the radar in the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System) built at the height of the cold war.) Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified.

Silicon Valley 142

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Hearpreneur

JUNE 26, 2016

Our design team is comprised of top talent who have been laid off or have grown disenchanted with the big corporate models of major fashion brands (though by requirement they all have at least 5 years of major corporation experience). Thanks to Stefanie Tacata, Stateless Fashion Design and Consulting. #2 crew, Aeropostale, etc.

Entrepreneur 92

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