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?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 244

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. 1x hipster working with both product and growth.

Revenue 60

Revenue Acquisition Channel Campaign 60

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

The key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that. Lets see why.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 260

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2015

These growing national companies were challenged to figure out how to organize an organization of increased complexity that resulted from their large size, and geographic scale as well as their horizontal and vertical integration. and to develop professional managers and management hierarchies to run them.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Venture Capital United States Technical Review 120

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 125

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 125

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

It should go without saying that this post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply my observation of how companies using Customer Development positioned themselves to successfully raise money from venture investors. Is there a profitable business model? Can it scale?”

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 267

YoungUpstarts

FEBRUARY 11, 2019

Your patrons have shared their data all last year through clicks, subscriptions, customer service requests, sales inquiries and more — and now expect your business to be able to turn those interactions and touch points into a more targeted, holistic experience. With CRM revenues at 39.5 With CRM revenues at 39.5

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Artificial Inteligence Sales Cycle Colorado Retention 127

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In contrast, sales and marketing activities before first customer ship are adhoc, fuzzy, and don’t have measurable, concrete objectives. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 228

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.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 131

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 10, 2019

Compounding is the ability of an asset to generate earnings that are reinvested in order to generate exponential revenue growth. It has never paid out dividends, and clocks around $200 billion in revenue. million in revenue at the time. To some extent you can manage the revenue for a quarter or 2. Alpha generation.

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Founder Valuation Dividend Startup 148

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. I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. What happened?

Silicon Valley 143

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 143

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.

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 216

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 269

Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 269

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?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 220

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. A typical ad-based revenue stream on a media website is around $5 per 1000 eyeballs ($5m CPM and give or take $1-$20ish CPMs). Product second. Sales cycles matter though. This is obvious. Marketing first.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Hippoland

AUGUST 8, 2018

Diving in a bit more into some thoughts here: 1b) Ad-based revenue streams generally have terrible unit economics. A typical ad-based revenue stream on a media website is around $5 per 1000 eyeballs ($5m CPM and give or take $1-$20ish CPMs). Product second. Sales cycles matter though. This is obvious. Marketing first.

Founder 48

Founder Sales Cycle Affiliate Retention 48

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. What is the right revenue model? In other words, what is the minimum viable product ? My blog has over 14000 subscribers, for example. Is that a lot? Is that good? August 24, 2009 2:17 PM Norbert Mocsnik said.

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales. While this may seem obvious to anyone not in sales and marketing, trust me, in a technology company this is a conceptual breakthrough. Every product marketer thought they should help define the product feature set, etc.

Silicon Valley 132

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Sloan realized that the traditional centralized management structures (like General Motors had in 1920) were poor fits for the management of GM’s already diverse product lines. 2) Provide corporate management with near real-time divisional sales reports and budgets that indicated when they deviated from plan.

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Silicon Valley United States RSS Customer Development 179

Small Business Force

MARCH 8, 2013

Net, net, strategic partnerships , whether to expand sales channels in specific vertical or geographic markets, or to expand product offerings, or joint development of new products, enable entrepreneurs to add resources while conserving capital.In effect, each company brings something the other lacks or wants.

Partner 37

Partner Small Business .Net Vertical 37

Occam's Razor

MAY 27, 2015

I've suffered enough bruises on the front-lines from trying to re-imagine the current and revolutionize the future across multiple industry verticals, countries, opportunity sizes. Our advertising will rain down massive revenues! !" Get an extremely clear sense for what the right choice is in each case. Magnificent.

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Analytics Marketing Mobile Audience 60

ConversionXL

DECEMBER 3, 2018

Copper’s Relationship Era does the same for the sales industry, and Dialpad’s Anywhere Worker paints a picture of simple, streamlined communication for SMBs. Most businesses have a handful of target accounts they dream of closing—big, prestigious companies that could generate a whole lot of revenue in a single deal.

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B2B Marketing SEO Search 133