The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

At Treehouse, we’re trying to make technology education affordable and accessible to everyone on Earth, and doing that means that we’ll be working for a really long time and will likely always have more to do. If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. Stay lean for as long as possible. Find your niche.

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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. The same is true in your company.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 19, 2017

The lean start-up movement has been based on a single insight – which the purpose of a start-up is to discover a business model that works. In this article we explore the unique challenges of a lean start-up and how Outsourced Product Development (OPD) can be used to overcome them. The Lean Start-Up Environment.

Product Development 153

Product Development Lean Developer Product 153

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. Technology? Product Development – How do you engineer it? Waterfall, Agile, Lean? M&A, IPO?

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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

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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. When I wrote the Four Steps to the Epiphany , the Customer Development text, I hadn’t yet thought about what vertical markets it might be appropriate for.)

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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. Would you mind sharing them?

Silicon Valley 125

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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. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.

Video 164

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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. In building ESL Perry made a conscious choice to emulate Hewlett Packard (then considered the “gold standard” of a great technology company.) The “customers’” contracts funded the company.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

The other revels in the world as we all know it will be someday: limitless distribution enabled by new technologies, the importance of collaborative filters, and on-demand availability of all content for end-users. But the same technologies that make life difficult for traditional marketers also offer them unprecedented new opportunities.

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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. No kidding.

Silicon Valley 180

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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

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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.

Silicon Valley 131

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. None of this was an accident. It was all part of a strategy.

Silicon Valley 124

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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.

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Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

And I understood engineering since I interacted with them almost daily. And finally, I had a great working relationship with our engineers who designed the chips. I found that having a senior marketer responsible for business strategy surrounded by ex-engineers and domain experts makes one heck of a powerful marketing department.

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Some students who were getting their engineering graduate degrees wrote masters and PhD thesis that were classified. Other universities doing classified ELINT and Electronic Warfare work attended including University of Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology and Cornell. Unless you had the proper clearances you couldn’t read them.

Silicon Valley 142

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ConversionXL

JUNE 30, 2019

The lean, aggressive ones do. What I’m looking for are common trends within that vertical. Studying your competitors’ technology stacks can shed light on their level of maturity as a digital marketing organization. Reviewing a competitor’s online presence helps me understand how to differentiate my client. reviews, trust).

SEO 126

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ConversionXL

MAY 11, 2017

The lean, aggressive ones do. What I am looking for is common trends within that vertical. Studying your competitors’ technology stacks can shed light on their level of maturity as a digital marketing organization. Reviewing a competitor’s online presence helps me understand how to differentiate my client.

SEO 131

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David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

When I met my now-wife, I realized that any technology that can find me a spouse is a killer app. I’d argue that the same type of technologies that have revolutionized dating can revolutionize our industry. . I walk through below how progressive investors are using technology and analytics throughout all of their operations.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 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. The meaning of alpha test , beta test, and first customer ship are pretty obvious to most engineers. What plan says that?

Customer Development 215

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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. It was adopted by the consumer packaged goods industry in the 1950s and spread to the technology business in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Silicon Valley 260

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 260

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

I am also a pilot, and computer engineer, and love to read stories about sigint and black aircraft programs. It’s not something I’ve heard often from those in the technology sphere. Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. It may not be for you.

Silicon Valley 170

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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 2, 2009

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed.

Silicon Valley 124

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model.

Customer Development 242

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Frederick Terman, Stanford’s Dean of Engineering, enlisted Stanford University as a major arms suppliers in this war. Stanford as a Center of Microwave and Electronics In 1946 after running the military’s secret 800 person Electronic Warfare Lab at Harvard, Fred Terman returned to Stanford as the dean of the engineering schoo l.

Silicon Valley 153

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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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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department. Then shout the messages out (virtually) at the top of your lungs. Visually, demo’s, wild colors, etc. IBM doesn’t have to shout to get noticed, but you do.

Silicon Valley 178

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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

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. On the other hand, the Motorola 68000 microprocessor (used in the Sun and Apollo engineering workstations) and the IBM 360/370 mainframes were big-endian. What a great idea.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 278

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.

Venture Capital 209

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Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog produced one of the first 8-bit microprocessors , the Z-80 (competing at the time with Intel’s 8080 , Motorola 6800, and MOS Technology 6502.) I looked around the room thinking I’d see the faces of the engineers in the ESL M-4 vault, but these were different people. VP of Sales? Wait a minute. where am I? Who were these people?

Silicon Valley 175

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Think of a plane the length of a 767 airliner (but with 30 foot longer wings and 8 engines rather than 2) whose only mission was to FedEx 70,000 pounds of nuclear weapons to the Soviet Union. Think of the most amazing spectrum analyzer you could build with 1960s technology. Then think some more. I was always kind of curious.

Silicon Valley 195

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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

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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 remember thinking, “What a disappointment one of the smartest engineers I know and he is going to waste his time making games.”

Silicon Valley 120

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Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

It makes you appreciate that the Silicon Valley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) 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. Are You Single?

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