Up and Running

JULY 26, 2016

Between January 2015 and January 2016, we grew our platform Slidebean from $1K to $20K in monthly recurring revenue. Getting the first tracks of revenue is one of the toughest processes of building a startup. 1x hacker in charge of product/development. Dec-15: Developer (product team). Lean marketing.

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. When I started Shapeways, complex software needed to be built and when I first reached out to developers, a lot of them laughed and told me it was impossible. Stay lean for as long as possible. Be creative, and stay lean. Find your niche. Don’t listen.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

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 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. There was now a public market for companies with no revenue, no profit and big claims.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 223

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. 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.

Customer Development 220

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I began to gain an appreciation of how world-class venture capitalists develop pattern recognition for these common types of problems. “Oh I have been working on getting a startup to revenue for a while, and while this is my 4th iteration and I have not yet succeeded, I’ve been learning new things every time.

Silicon Valley 126

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” 4) You don’t see any revenue gain past three years. 2) They don’t care about your profitibility and ultimately, your staying power.

Customer 201

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 201

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

All successful media companies had at their heart a series of editors, producers, and agents tasked with discovering and developing new talent. When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

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. Over its lifetime a Lean Startup may spend less money than a traditional startup. Lets see why.

Lean 250

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 250

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 263

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. What happened?

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 133

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?

Customer Development 203

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 203

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 5, 2013

A good many startups I know have been “successful” over a couple of years in overcoming the challenges of starting the business, including incorporation, services development, funding, and setting up operations. Maintenance contracts are another great way to create a brand-new revenue stream. Keep you office running lean and mean.

Entrepreneur 234

Entrepreneur Vertical Reputation Valuation 234

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

This post describes how companies using the Customer Development model can increase their credibility, valuation and probability of getting a first round of funding by presenting their results in a “Lesson Learned&# venture pitch. Is there a profitable business model? Can it scale?” Just as a refresher.

Customer Development 264

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 264

Startup Professionals Musings

JULY 6, 2012

A good many startups I know have been “successful” over a couple of years in overcoming the challenges of starting the business, including incorporation, services development, funding, and setting up operations. Maintenance contracts are another great way to create a brand-new revenue stream. Keep you office running lean and mean.

Startup 236

Startup Vertical Reputation Valuation 236

Where to Play

MARCH 14, 2018

When we founded Augury, we had a very clear vision in mind: ‘machines talk, and we should be able to understand what they are saying’ We wanted to develop a technology that listens to the sounds machines make to diagnose their problems and predict malfunctions. At times, it seemed like the possibilities were endless.

Artificial Inteligence 91

Artificial Inteligence Marketing Vertical Startup 91

Startup Professionals Musings

MARCH 28, 2011

A good many startups I know have been “successful” over a couple of years in overcoming the challenges of starting the business, including incorporation, services development, funding, and setting up operations. Maintenance contracts are another great way to create a brand-new revenue stream. Keep you office running lean and mean.

Startup 230

Startup Vertical Reputation Valuation 230

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 3, 2022

No changes were made to the customer journey, and it had nothing to do with revenue lift. It isn’t about finding quick hacks to boost short-term revenue. Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. The growth marketing approach to this problem would be to develop a series of experiments.

Framework 102

Framework Marketing Acquisition Retention 102

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 9, 2022

The average developer or designer doesn’t spend any time watching people use the things they’re designing. The last link in a horizontal navigation menu (or the bottom one in a vertical menu) should be “Contact.” A good way to go about redesigns is to use the Lean Design methodology.

Design 116

Design Web Search Chicago 116

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Inversely, if you’re using the agency model to fund another startup or product, you should probably keep things lean. Conduct client development interviews. Relying on client development alone will give you only part of the picture. Image source ).

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

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. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 263

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 263

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. I call this process “Customer Development,” a sibling to “Product Development,” and each and every startup that succeeds recapitulates it, knowingly or not. But it is life and death for a new venture.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 128

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.) They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e.

Silicon Valley 182

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 182

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan put in place GM’s management accounting system (borrowed from DuPont) that for the first time allowed the company to: 1) produce an annual operating forecast that compared each division’s forecast (revenue, costs, capital requirements and return on investment) with the company’s financial goals.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 161

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.)

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. So the first heuristic is: do not assume the startup rules are the same for all vertical markets. Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

Vertical 151

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 151

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

We Changed Our Mind In 1966, 10 years after Hewlett’s memo, Hewlett Packard’s revenue and headcount had grown ten fold; $200 million and 11,000 employees – all from test and measurement equipment. Instead of bemoaning the demise of an old company we should be celebrating new companies that develop new helpful technologies.

Silicon Valley 169

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 169

crowdSPRING Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2018

Branding is a process designed to develop, among other things, a unique business name and custom logo design for a company, product, or service. Some have spent millions of dollars developing branding to attract tourists and businesses. 3) Develop personas for your target customers. Develop your brand identity assets.

Marketing 162

Marketing Charlotte Naming Design 162

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

ConversionXL

AUGUST 29, 2012

The average developer or designer doesn’t spend any time ever watching people use the things they are designing. 20% of the users spend 80% of the revenue on a site, and it’s those top buyers that are most effected by redesigns. I believe most websites are designed with good intentions. It’s not that people hate change.

Design 111

Design Web Search Chicago 111

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

This provides us more time to develop meaningful relationships with prospects and customers. Lean Case provides standard business models & metrics, so you can apply a standard approach to business planning, modeling, and profitability tracking. Tribe Capital has developed A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit. .

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

You can be an Independent studio or do “work for hire&# (either a revenue share or buy-out model) - If you’re an independent studio you have a set of choices for distribution channel and marketing models. - Reply The failure of a promising developer – in slow motion | Control Pad , on July 29, 2009 at 12:49 pm Said: [.]

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based. Reply Chris Neumann , on August 26, 2009 at 9:41 am Said: I think you need to look at the incentive system for TechCrunch. Mike Arrington is a capitalist. He knows how to publish articles that drive page views, and this is a good one.

Silicon Valley 191

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 191

mobile.smashingmagazine.com

JANUARY 16, 2013

A mobile-optimized structure, however, leans towards a “taller” arrangement in addition to hierarchies. If I were visiting your site on a mobile device, I would be more inclined to re-visit later on a desktop device – thus giving you revenue you would otherwise miss on – if the experience was nice on a mobile device.

Mobile 101

Mobile HTML Flash Software Review 101

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

But without sales there is no revenue, and without revenue there is no company. All the strategic thinking in the world won’t make up for a missed revenue plan. If sales revenue and profits are high enough, we could take the company public or sell it, and the stock would be worth more than the paper it was printed on.

Silicon Valley 127

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www.chubbybrain.com

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011

spent $20 million to get back to the same revenue that I had when I was CEO. created a vastly higher cost structure; I had 80 people mostly on base salaries under $100,000 and was bringing in revenue at the rate of $20 million annually. .”). During this year they. deprecated the old feature-complete product (ACS 3.4)

Software Review 79

Software Review Startup Technical Review Vesting 79