Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. 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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 255

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack. The alternative to the traditional product introduction process is the Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack. The Customer Development process is then used to test each of the 9 building blocks of the business model. No one gets fired.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 252

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Other weeks Yuri would be buffeted by the realities of his burn rate, declining bank account and depressing comments from customers.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 323

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance. Jonathan Swift.

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Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 300

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the Startup, it’s time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. The only numbers in those documents that are important in the first year of a startup’s life are burn rate and cash balance. Jonathan Swift.

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Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 273

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 13, 2011

As customer and agile development reinvent the startup, it's time to ask why startup board governance has not kept up with the pace of innovation. The process, which Blank detailed in his book, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany," uses customer feedback to refine and improve a product before scaling a business. Here's how.

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Silicon Valley Balance Sheet Metrics Early Stage 117

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

The Curse of a New Building At some point in my career as I began to ponder how/why startups morph from agile, “can do&# companies to [.] [.] I think there’s a size and scale where regardless of your intentions lean and agile won’t work (looking like a grandmother in a miniskirt.) A VERY nice office.

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Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 233

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. The product didnt convert well enough, the mainstream customers we were driving werent ready for the concept, and the event fed expectations about how successful the product was going to be that turned out to be hyper-inflated. Combining agile development with customer developm.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

The full formula works like this: runway = cash on hand / burn rate # iterations = runway / speed of each iteration Very few successful companies ended up in the same exact business that the founders thought theyd be in (see Founders at Work for dozens of examples). Combining agile development with customer developm.

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Without conscious process design, product development teams turn lines of code written into momentum in a certain direction. This is why agility is such a prized quality in product development. Worse was the large staff in departments appropriate to a mainstream-scale product, especially in customer service and QA.

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San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150