crowdSPRING Blog

MAY 5, 2010

These posts and videos are about design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! 20 incredible examples of smooth horizontal and vertical sliding navigation websites – [link]. Startup Tip: Marketing One-To-One – [link]. Thinking About Doing – [link].

Social Media 88

Social Media Small Business Design Media 88

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

In times when venture capital is hard to get, investors extract high costs for failure (down-rounds, cram downs , new management teams, shut down the company.) Marketing demand creation programs (Search Engine Marketing, Public Relations, Advertising, Lead Generation, Trade Shows, etc.)

Lean 253

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 253

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Now with a new infusion of $8 million dollars of venture capital, SuperMac had been resurrected from the dead and was attempting to restart. Why they were looking to me to run marketing wasn’t clear. The company was the laughing stock of the Mac market. The first step was to recruit a new management team.

Silicon Valley 151

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 151

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. Since my class was using the Customer Development text, I updated this diagram on to reflect in which markets the process was appropriate.

Vertical 130

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 130

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. Ultimately you want to see if you can find customers and a market for the product as specified – as early as possible. Technology?

Vertical 123

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 123

Hearpreneur

DECEMBER 8, 2019

Throughout that development process the marketing team kept pressing, leading the company to 50,000 influencers over the Summer, which made us the largest warm contact influencer network in the market. I knew all the time I’m not that type of person to give in ever, regardless of difficult situations in life and in business.

Entrepreneur 120

Entrepreneur Technical Review Vertical Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who between them put $12 million into my last failed startup. (My I began to gain an appreciation of how world-class venture capitalists develop pattern recognition for these common types of problems. My mother kept asking if they were going to make me pay the money back.

Silicon Valley 126

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 126

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market ? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? No, not really.

Silicon Valley 145

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 145

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building.

Customer Development 125

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 125

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

» Dig for Leadership - Stories that try to make the world a better place. , AKPC_IDS += "499,"; (No Ratings Yet) Loading … Posted in Leadership | Tagged [.] But make sure it fits who you are. The rest is worth reading as well. steve Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime. carry on reading.

Cofounder 224

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 224

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

To an entrepreneur, being asked to join a venture firm with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means you have been tapped on the shoulder by the VC gods. As Peter began to speak extemporaneously our mouths slowly fell open as he described the video game market, its size, its demographics, the state of the technology, and the state of games.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

David Teten

AUGUST 19, 2019

I’ve been a traditional equity VC for 8 years, and I’m now researching new business models in venture capital. RBI normally requires founders to pay back their investors with a fixed percentage of revenue until they have finished providing the investor with a fixed return on capital, which they agree upon in advance.

Revenue 60

Revenue Technical Review Software Review Equity 60

Austin Startup

MARCH 7, 2018

Heather is an outspoken advocate for women in tech leadership roles and building an inclusive and diverse workforce. An early Human Rights Campaign board member and longtime Austin LGBTQ leader, Eugene co-chaired President Obama’s & the DNC’s LGBTQ Leadership Council.

Technical Cofounder 48

Technical Cofounder Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 48

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

Silicon Valley 187

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 187

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Knowing this venture firms have come up with a canonical checklist of what they would like to see. Do they believe you have a big enough vision and market. Tons of advice is available on how to pitch , present and market your company. Did the VC’s like your team ? Did the partner have a good or bad day, etc. Of course not.

Customer Development 266

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 266

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” The first question to ask is: “Does your startup have market risk or is it dominated by technical risk?” Lean Startup /Customer Development is used to find answers to the unknowns about customers and markets.

Customer Development 224

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 224

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities. Now the VP of Marketing starts sweating.

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 229

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Home Books for Startups Secret History-Bibliography Steve Blank Startup Resources Steve Blank Entries RSS | Comments RSS Categories Air Force (9) Ardent (9) Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan (29) California Coastal Commission (3) Conservation (2) Convergent Technologies (1) Customer Development (98) Customer Development Manifesto (..)

Silicon Valley 305

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 305

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

And since there was no Venture Capital in the 1950′s/’60′s where was the money coming from? 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. What created this microwave startup culture in the 1950′s? Why was it occurring here?

Silicon Valley 283

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 283

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

What Markets? My job was to figure out what markets Ardent should target, who were the key customers in these markets and what applications these customers had to have. The one thing I did know is that we were probably going to be running some of the same applications as the market leader Cray. It was Volume 7 issue 2.

Silicon Valley 152

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 152

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

After more customer interviews, we have shifted our market type hypothesis to- entering an existant market. Yan , on December 20, 2009 at 5:57 pm Said: This post reconfirms my strong beliefs- efforts to secure you as an advisor once we get traction. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley Turkey United States RSS 140

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I finally understood how valuable these contests can be for students in cities or countries without a venture capital or entrepreneurial infrastructure. as one attempt to clearly define how exactly the company is creating value in the market. to compete.

Business Plan 144

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 144

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

At the same time we were educating the press , we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Silicon Valley 266

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 266

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) I’ve convinced the team you’d be perfect, come join us as the VP of Marketing.” It would be the company where I actually earned the title.

North Carolina 126

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 126

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

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. I remember presenting our ideas for Marketing Automation to one VP of Marketing in a large Silicon Valley company. He was now CEO of a new company in our market.

Silicon Valley 236

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 236

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Status Report At Ardent the marketing department was responsible for acquiring applications for our supercomputer. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. I realized that my daughter had confused motion with action.

Silicon Valley 329

Silicon Valley Software Review RSS Technical Review 329

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. what Market Type is your startup? The next thing you need to do is match your sales team with your market type.

Technology 140

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 140

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. For me this was one of the joys of entrepreneurship – constant learning and new insights.

Customer 203

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 203

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call from our local salesman that someone at Apple wanted more technical information than just the spec sheets about our new (not yet shipping) chip. Market Type But most startups aren’t in existing markets. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 134

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 134

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

For startup founders, it’s never too early to start thinking about putting together a target market advisory board. The target market advisory board should consist of 2–4 industry veterans who have connections to C-level execs and VPs in your target market. Target market advisors can help add to your credibility.

Advisory Board 48

Advisory Board Sweat Equity Marketing Vertical 48

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? In other words what was the Total Available Market (TAM) and how much of the market had been already served? First, I presented what I had learned.

Silicon Valley 137

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 137

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

Customer Development 242

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 242

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. So I hired a VP of Marketing from Sega, one of the video game platforms on which our games would run. Look, we’re on the cover of Wired magazine.

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 213

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Little Indians and Big Indians At MIPS Computers , my second semiconductor company, I was the VP of Marketing and defacto head of Sales. I was just in marketing. Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. No, not really. All I had done was proudly go out and get customer input.

Customer Development 283

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 283

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. I thought I was bright, aggressive and could do no wrong as a marketer. Read the previous Ardent post for context.)

Silicon Valley 279

Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development California 279

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. Over the years marketers have found that using numbers to compare yourself to other products works well. Now as VP of Marketing, I could have sat back and let my PR agency handle the press.

Silicon Valley 124

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 124

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

We four instructors would grumble and complain to one another about our lack of leadership. What’s Marketing? But the one group that had me stumped was something called “marketing.&# &# Explain it to me again,&# I’d ask. For entrepreneurs good things come to those who ask. But Intel was kicking our rear.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120