Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

There was nothing suggesting that startups and new ventures needed their own tools and techniques, different from those written about in HBR or taught in business schools. To fill this gap I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany , a book about the Customer Development process and how it changes the way startups are built.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 223

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

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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

Lean 263

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 263

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Given the stock market was buying “the story and vision” of anything internet, inflated expectations were more important than traditional metrics like customers, growth, revenue, or heaven forbid, profits. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Berkeley Haas Business School is a leader in entrepreneurship education. It has replaced how to write a business plan with hands-on Lean Startup methods. The final deliverable for that class was a 30-page business plan. We had multiple business plan competitions. The Business Plan is Dead.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

I earnestly believe that large corporations should emulate Lean Startups (Business model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering.) It gets really tough when these projects are launched and have to fight for survival against current corporate business models. Lessons Learned.

Programming 273

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 273

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

Most principles of Lean Startup remain true, as described by Steve Blank in The Lean Startup Changes Everything : Business Plans are dead: Startups a series of hypothesis that need to be tested. Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. 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. Nail it to your wall.

Customer Development 331

Customer Development Developer Customer Cofounder 331

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Best practices in software development started to move to agile development in the early 2000’s. This methodology improved on waterfall by building software iteratively and involving the customer. With Agile you could end up satisfying every feature a customer asked for and still go out of business.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

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

JUNE 8, 2021

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. 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. It Started With An Idea.

Lean 417

Lean Security Asia SBIR 417

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. She posted her notes from the talk here.)

Customer Development 278

Customer Development Business Model Developer Design 278

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I coach agile teams for a living, and I do most of my work with start-ups. I said, “well for me you’d have to add coming from a dysfunctional family.”

Founder 312

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 312

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. This business plan was a static document.

Business Plan 335

Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go” instead of detailed, formal business plans. Lean Planning started with Tim Berry ‘s 2008 “ Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan ” which was a new way for entrepreneurs to think about planning. The business plan should no longer be just a single event.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. It made more sense than our 60 page business plan predicated on a B-school class and a supernatural ability to predict the future. Lessons Learned.

Customer Development 231

Customer Development Developer Customer California 231

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. Your First Iteration of an Idea Will Be Wrong.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. 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. It Started with an Idea.

Oakland 315

Oakland Asia Lean Video 315

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. While these objectives provide an illusion of progress, in reality they do little to validate the business plan hypotheses about customers and what they will buy.

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

Established businesses execute business models while startups search for them. I was a lone voice inside one of the country’s leading business schools challenging the conventional wisdom of the last 40 years, proposing that everything we were teaching about starting companies was wrong.

Lean 224

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 224

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 ? Don’t Throw the Tomatoes.

Search 326

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 326

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. How Does Customer Development, Agile Development and Lean Startups Fit? Business Plan Versus Business Model.

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley 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

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. Teaches you how to use Customer Development to test it. Integration with Customer Development and Lean Startup.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 11, 2010

This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. When founders discover their assumptions are wrong, as they inevitably will, the result isn’t a crisis , it’s a learning event called a pivot — and an opportunity to update the business model.

Agile 256

Agile Business Model Customer Development Lean 256

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

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. entrepreneurship is experiential and requires theory and a ton of practice. Every week the teams present their results.

Lean 120

Lean Incubator Business Model Channel 120

Steve Blank

MAY 10, 2011

These diagrams are the visual representation of the how and the what a team learned in the class – how they tested their hypotheses by getting out of the building using the Customer Development process and what they learned about each part of their business model. is just another engineering process, not building a business.

Lean 288

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 288

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) Many entrepreneurship courses focus on teaching students “how to write a business plan.” This class is not about how to write a business plan.

Wiki 318

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 318

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups built every possible feature the founding team envisioned (using “Waterfall development,”) into a monolithic “release” of the product taking months or years to build a first product release. The Business Plan (Concept- Alpha-Beta - FCS ) became the playbook for startups. Rules For the New Bubble: 2011 -2014.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The idea of a Business Model competition first emerged when I realized that Business Plan writing ought to be taught in English Departments – as they’re the best example of creative writing entrepreneurs will ever do. The Business Plan ?- And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination.

Business Model 270

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 270

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Notice that the traditional product introduction model leads to a product launch and the execution of a revenue plan. The revenue numbers and revenue model came from a startups original Business Plan. that make up a business model. We were changing the business model when we changed executives. Ritualized Crises.

Burn Rate 252

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 252

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. Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan Business Model versus Business Plan'

IRR 335

IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

The class is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world. The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known.

Lean 263

Lean Business Model Agile United States 263

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 14, 2012

The class was designed to teach educators (and the entrepreneurs that support them) the Lean LaunchPad approach (Business Model Design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) for teaching entrepreneurship. But on the first day, Steve framed it in a different way: execution of a business plan doesn’t matter.

Developer 308

Developer Arizona Lean Business Model 308

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

And how thinking of a solution to this commonly used model’s failures led to a new model – the Customer Development Model – that offers a new way to approach startup activities outside the building. Product Development Diagram 1. Where exactly did the assumptions in our startup business plan come from?”

Customer Development 245

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2020

This course provides real world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to actually start a company or to find a new business model for an existing one. This class is not about how to write a business plan. It’s not an exercise on how smart you are in a classroom, or how well you use the research to size markets.

Lean 335

Lean Business Model Affiliate Incubator 335