Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2014

It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses and agile engineering to build minimum viable products. These two components of the business model are so important we give them their own name, “Product/Market Fit.”.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. The Lean LaunchPad class uses the three “ Lean Startup ” principles: Alexander Osterwalders “ business model canvas ” to frame hypotheses. Lessons Learned.

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s. With Agile you could end up satisfying every feature a customer asked for and still go out of business. A major improvement over Waterfall development, Build Measure Learn lets startups be fast, agile and efficient.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan. To be fair, in the 20 th century, there really wasn’t a model for how to build startups other than write plan, raise money, and execute – the bubble was this method, on steroids.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual. When you leave the class, you’ll know how to think about your startup in the now standard “language” of the business model canvas.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

By the end of the 20th century, case studies and business plans had reached an evolutionary dead-end for entrepreneurs. The Rise of Business Schools – Management as an Occupation. The business school was invented in the first decade of the 20th century in response to a massive economic transformation in the U.S.

Lean 436

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Startup Professionals Musings

MAY 29, 2019

A platform is a business model and capability that can be accessed and customized by external users. Amazon is famous for their Two-Pizza.Teams (no bigger than two pizzas will feed), allowing an entrepreneurial mindset more autonomy, agility, and accountability. Master the magic of small autonomous teams.

Artificial Inteligence 222

Artificial Inteligence Agile Technical Review Demand 222

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. We were positing that 20 years of teaching “how to write a business plan” might be obsolete. This post is part one.

Lean 307

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

Entrenched Innovation Model Issues : Qualcomm’s existing innovation model – wireless products were created in the R&D lab and then handed over to existing business units for commercialization – was wildly successful in the existing wireless and mobile space. Venture Fest was not integral to their success.

Programming 273

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 273

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 15, 2010

In previous posts I’ve talked about what the combination of Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Methodologies mean to startups and intrapreneurs in large companies; it’s the beginning of entrepreneurship as a science with its own rules and methodologies. Teaching In the Big Apple.

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Business Model Developer Design 278

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Alexander Osterwalder and I spent last week in Salt Lake City, Utah as judges at the 2 nd Annual International Business Model Competition , hosted by Professor Nathan Furr , and his team at the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. The Business Plan ?- And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination.

Business Model 270

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 270

Up and Running

FEBRUARY 28, 2011

Tweet What’s a business model? How does it relate to a business plan? Or, better yet, business planning? Your business planning makes your business model happen. And your business plan is a regular step in your business planning. They synchronize.

Business Plan 94

Business Plan Business Model Agile Software 94

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Then we saw the great alignment between the Customer Development Model and the Agile software development methodologies so we decided to create the course IIC3515 “Workshop of Entrepreneurship with Software” that applies both models to develop real software products with customers from the startup ideas of the students.

Chile 241

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 241

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning™. It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go” instead of detailed, formal business plans. Build an action plan: How are you going to validate your assumptions and measure progress?

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

With an out-of-this-world business plan. When it was spun out as a a separate company, Iridium’s 1990 business plan had assumptions about potential customers, their problems and the product needed to solve that problem. A Business Plan Frozen in Time. No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique. This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. It Started With An Idea.

Lean 416

Lean Security Asia SBIR 416

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2016

To be honest I built the class out of frustration watching schools teach aspiring entrepreneurs that all they need to know is how to write a business plan or how to sit in an incubator building a product. using the business model canvas as the framework. in order to validate/invalidate their business model hypotheses.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 8, 2021

You may have a descriptive, thorough business plan to serve as the blueprint for the present and future of your organization – but there’s no guarantee it’s going to pan out the way you think. Uncertainty. There’s also a lot of uncertainty within a startup. For example, you’ll need to think about company profitability.

Employee 127

Employee Product Startup Software Review 127

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2010

The key things I want students to take from the class are: Understand that a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a profitable business model. Learn how to put together a business model , not a business plan. Class Logistics. As described in the previous post , this is a hands-on class.

Business Model 236

Business Model Silicon Valley California Engineer 236

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

As we prepared for the new Hacking for Defense class at Stanford, we had to stop and ask ourselves: How do we use the Business Model Canvas if the primary goal is not to earn money, but to fulfill a mission? In other words, how can we adapt the Business Model Canvas when the metrics of success for an organization is not revenue?

Business Model 120

Business Model Revenue Channel Community 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2017

A CEO brought in from a large company came with all the big company accoutrements – org charts, HR departments with formal processes and procedure handbooks, formal waterfall engineering methodology, sales compensation plans, etc. — all great things when you are executing and scaling a known business model. Board Control.

Founder 278

Founder Technical Review CTO Hire IPO 278

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 13, 2016

Alexander Osterwalder invented the Business Model Canvas , co-founded strategyzer.com and was the lead author of Business Model Generation which sold a million copies in 30 languages. Big companies have great execution habits to manage and improve successful business models and value propositions.

Non-Compete 332

Non-Compete Agile Business Model San Francisco 332

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2020

We’re holding a series of 5-day online classes at Stanford where teams will learn how to develop new business models for an economy that’s getting back to work and on the road to recovery. The Covid-19 virus has upended traditional ways of doing business, travel, education, entertainment, healthcare, etc. Sign up at [link].

Lean 436

Lean Business Model Affiliate Incubator 436

Steve Blank

MARCH 5, 2012

One of the confusing things to entrepreneurs, investors and educators is the relationship between customer development and business model design and business planning and execution. When does a new venture focus on customer development and business models ? Here’s an attempt to put this all in context.

Search 326

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 326

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. Every large company, whether it can articulate it or not, is executing a proven business model (s).

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

SoCal CTO

MAY 4, 2010

Some great posts from April 2010 that talk to me in terms of being a CTO at a Startup.

CTO Hire 150

CTO Hire Vesting Venture Capital Startup 150

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. It dawned on me that the plans were a symptom of a larger problem: we were executing business plans when we should first be searching for business models. We were putting the plan before the planning.

Lean 295

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 295

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 11, 2010

A place to start would be by recognizing the fundamental difference between an existing company and a startup: existing companies execute business models, while startups search for a business model. (Or Therefore the very foundations of teaching entrepreneurship should start with how to search for a business model.

Agile 256

Agile Business Model Customer Development Lean 256

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

All the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ) Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, but all of their journeys were unique. I observed that teaching case studies and/or how to write a business plan as a capstone entrepreneurship class didn’t match the hands-on chaos of a startup.

Oakland 314

Oakland Asia Lean Video 314

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 3, 2018

Then, you draft your business model and plan. First you draft an executive summary of your business plan. Then you write down a brief about your company and business model. Then you decide which development methodology to follow – traditional or agile. It can be either android, iOS or both.

Mobile 113

Mobile Developer Social Media Later Stage 113

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

What really matters are the business model canvas diagrams in the body and appendix of each presentation. By comparing the changes the teams made week-to-week-week in their business model canvas diagrams, you’ll see the dynamics of entrepreneurship, as they iterate and Pivot over time. Why Did We Teach This Class?

Lean 288

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 288

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

In this post we’re going to offer a new definition of why startups exist : a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. A Business Model. Ok, but what is a business model ? A business model describes how your company creates, delivers and captures value.

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Entrepreneurs put together their funding presentation by extracting the key ideas from their business plan, putting them on PowerPoint/Keynote and pitching the company – until they get funded or exhausted.

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 270

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

Established businesses execute business models while startups search for them. Shortly after that, I met Pete Newell , the retired head of the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force – one of the best Lean and agile organizations in the military – and I met Joe Felter an ex Special Forces Colonel.

Lean 224

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 224

Startup Professionals Musings

AUGUST 12, 2019

We certainly want to hear about any positive feedback you have from potential customers on your idea, your prototype, and your business model, but that better not be the end of the story. We want to see a documented business plan that clearly addresses this challenge.

Intellectual Property 215

Intellectual Property Agile Differentiation Government 215

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model. No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers. There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside.

Customer Development 331

Customer Development Developer Customer Cofounder 331

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

I wondered if business plans and 5-year forecasts were the right way to plan a startup. It dawned on me that the plans were a symptom of a larger problem: we were executing business plans when we should first be searching for business models. We were putting the plan before the planning.

Lean 187

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 187