Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the 20 th century startups I was part of, the time to build a first product release was measured in years as we turned out the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. That’s no longer the case. The founders.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 7, 2011

Maybe hire an employee for $30 per hour and re-bill them at $60. Suppose you hire an employee at $60,000/year. So your cost per billable hour is: Nominal Cost: $30/hour. Recomputing the cost of the remaining billable hours, we have: 20 WD/month, $31/hour. The true cost of an employee is double the nominal cost.

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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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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure.

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The Next Web

MARCH 6, 2014

Successful collaboration between a company’s business development and product development requires mutual understanding and purpose. Practice Agile Development. Hire T-Shaped People. Make sure to hire T-shaped individuals. Matt Ehrlichman , Porch. Consider Using a Liaison. Andrew Thomas , SkyBell.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. A hardware startup had to spend money building prototypes and equipping a factory to manufacture the product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 11, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, February 11, 2009 The free software hiring advantage This is one of those startup tips Im a little reluctant to share, because its been such a powerful source of competitive advantage in the companies Ive worked with. This approach gives you an edge in hiring. Instead, engage with the project.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste. I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

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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. innovation.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

In addition to presenting the IMVU case, we tried for the first time to do an overview of a software engineering methodology that integrates practices from agile software development with Steves method of Customer Development. Ive attempted to embed the relevant slides below.

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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. Where is the budget for purchasing the type of product you’re selling? What’s the customer acquisition cost?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 2, 2008

We wanted an agile approach that would allow us to build our software architecture as we needed it, without downtime, but also without large amounts of up-front cost. After all, the worst kind of waste in software development is code to support a use case that never materializes. Expo SF (May.

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Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

MAY 22, 2019

Companies are investing in innovation training, mostly learning frameworks like Lean, Agile, or Design Thinking. Nearly all that training is for dedicated innovation teams , or employees who are focused on new product development. Many employees, hired to do operations, don’t feel that innovation is part of their job.

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A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

AUGUST 30, 2010

A virtual assistant (VA) is a remote worker hired to complete tasks you should not be doing as the founder of a startup. Ideally, by the time I code it up, we'll have many customers using the platform which means I'll be working on a product I know is viable, and that's paying for the time I'm spending to automate it. Case Studies.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Even worse, agile wasnt really helping me ship higher quality software.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

Boyd emphasized the importance of agility in combat: "the key to victory is to be able to create situations wherein one can make appropriate decisions more quickly than ones opponent." Lean startups have the ability to use this commodity stack to lower costs and, more importantly, reduce time to market. Agile software development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs interest payments, which come in the form of the extra effort that we have to do in future development because of the quick and dirty design choice. Although it costs to pay down the principal, we gain by reduced interest payments in the future.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

This builds on a lot of great thinking that has come before, like the agile movements insistence that only the creation of working code counts as progress for a software development team. None of it would have happened if we had plenty of cash, or were content to count our progress by traffic or product development milestones.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 25, 2010

This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Labels: product development Speed up or slow down? This is the first post that moves into making specific process recommendations for product development. Hence, cutting corners often paid huge dividends.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Refreshing to finally see lean and agile thinking emerge in product/business-floors and not only in technology. Critical also, as the lean company/start-up can not be lean by just using lean principles in IT and not in Product Development/Management - a common misinterpretation of the Toyota Production System.

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Hearpreneur

JANUARY 26, 2022

To prevent hackers from gaining access to your business's checking account, use low-cost software and dual controls to strengthen your payment processes. Prezi hired the former director of product from Pixar to build a more cinematic video meeting experience. Think of the agility that comes with CAI, etc.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

I am convinced one of Joel Spolskys lasting contributions to the field of managing software teams will turn out to be the Joel Test , a checklist of 12 essential practices that you could use to rate the effectiveness of a software product development team. Joel said it: "Top notch development teams dont torture their programmers."

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

Ship more infrequently While this may decrease downtime (things break and you roll back), the cost on development time from work and rework will be large, and mistakes will continue to slip through. That leads to a seemingly-obvious question: what is progress in software development? If a feature worked, wed keep it. We made it.

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Continuous Deployment San Francisco Software Review Lean 123

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We spent weeks working on this new product, racing the clock so it would be done in time for the real presidential debates. We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

While some cost-cutting measures reduce that number, others increase it. In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. Otherwise, cutting costs just leads to going out of business a little slower. Getting started with split-testing and the one-line split-test.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If youre trying to design an architecture to maximize agility, how can that work if some people are working in TDD and others not? In my mind, theyre racking up costs (one month for that part, two months for that other part, uh oh). Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. But a good day looked like this.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time? And in most situations, there is significant cost involved in negotiating over the right estimates to plug in. In other words, a principled way to combine agility with stability. How much will it cost to solve this problem now?

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

Luckily, I now have the benefit of a forthcoming book, The Principles of Product Development Flow. Labels: five whys root cause analysis , product development 11comments: Peter Severin said. Sounds very similar to agile development which is the way. Interesting post. February 21, 2009 7:39 AM Rocky1138 said.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 6, 2008 When NOT to listen to your users; when NOT to rely on split-tests There are three legs to the lean startup concept: agile product development , low-cost (fast to market) platforms , and rapid-iteration customer development. I think Drucker said it best.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 9, 2009

Thats the essence of so many of the lean startup techniques Ive evangelized: customer development , the Ideas/Code/Data feedback loop , and the adaptation of agile development to the startup experience. Creating a company-wide feedback loop that incorporates both customer development and agile development is a challenge.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development. You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steves book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Expo SF (May.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 9, 2009

The Lean Startup is a practical approach for creating and managing a new breed of company that excels in low-cost experimentation, rapid iteration, and true customer insight. It uses principles of agile software development, open source and web 2.0, February 9, 2009 7:45 PM Joseph Flahiff said. Check out what I am doing at.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

And we cant hire new engineers any faster, because you cant be interviewing and debugging and fixing all at the same time! Even with the highest standards imaginable, theres no way to hire just genius hackers. Hire a CTO or VP Engineering. Worst of all, your teammates are constantly wanting to have meetings. Just change it.

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Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model - first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.). If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors. However, your product itself will be doing a lot of the selling.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

So one of the first things we did was to hire an Oracle expert and get to work. It cost us a few hundred thousand dollars to get our app up and running, but none of that was dollars spent on software licenses or professional services. Thoughts on scientific product development Lo, my 5 subscribers, who are you?

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