Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

After these slides, these VC’s recognized that this company had dramatically reduced risk and built a startup that was agile, resilient and customer-centric. The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Your “Customer Development Process&# has really resonated for me.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 245

Steve Blank

MARCH 29, 2012

When Bob Dorf and I wrote the Startup Owners Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development. Startups Demand Comfort with Chaos and Uncertainty. So by popular demand, here’s a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto.

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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.

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Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

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

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Finally, I’ll write about 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.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

When you outsource your IT projects or hire an offshore development team, it comes with many benefits. For example, an agile software development lifecycle model encourages self-organization and motivation rather than the delegation of authority and a seniority hierarchy. This model has shown higher productivity levels.

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Developer Offshore Software Development Software Developers 102

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy. Your design or ad agencies can impress you with their awards, but if you’re not moving product or creating demand, you’ve missed the point.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

These tools—Customer Development, Agile Engineering, and Business Model design—became the lean start-up methodology , a rigorous approach to testing hypotheses and building prototypes, and, on the basis of data and evidence, adjusting or pivoting to a variant of the original hypothesis.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

How do we create end user demand? 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?

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Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.)

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 139

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

There are few courses which teach aspiring entrepreneurs the skills (business models, customer and agile development, design thinking, etc.) We’ll build the class around the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. to optimize this search. What are hypotheses?

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SVPG

OCTOBER 14, 2014

” We were big practitioners of what we now call Customer Development, and our customer was typically the IT organization of large companies. I remember being immediately struck by how different we designed and built technology, versus how our customers did. 5) Funding. 6) Process.

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Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

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Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 334

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

But the bubble mantra of get “big fast” and “first mover advantage” demanded tens of millions more to create a “brand.” Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development. Startups still required millions of dollars of funding.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

These explosions in company size and scale created a demand for professional managers. A decade later, I began to teach the foundations of Lean, first at UC Berkeley (Customer Development) and then at Stanford using cases and business plans. Lean-driven (hypothesis testing/business model/customer development/agile engineering).

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Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2020

The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: Customer Discovery, Agile Engineering and the Business/Mission Model Canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to talk to customers to do Customer Discovery when they can’t get out of the building? All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.

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Customer Business Model Restful Video 422

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

They used Customer and Agile development to search for a scalable and repeatable business model to become a large company. A scalable startup typically requires external “risk&# capital to create market demand and scale. Customer and Agile development to find the business model.

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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. The students were challenged to get users, orders, customers, etc.

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Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 288

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. existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups. This is a big idea.

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IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Key attributes of an entrepreneur on a founding team are passion, determination, resilience, tenacity, agility and curiosity. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture. Customer Development Family/Career/Culture' If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee.

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Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2010

Distribution, Demand Creation and Partnerships. Customer Discovery. None of the students were domain experts in their areas, and each team had to figure out how to contact potential customers and channel partners. Yet every team did figure out how to conduct extensive out of building Customer Discovery. (By

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Intellectual Property Business Model Customer Development Distribution 264

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

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. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

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Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 300

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

They operated this way because their existing business models didn’t allow them to initially profit from those opportunities – so they ignored them – and continued to chase higher profitability in more-demanding segments. Reading The Innovator’s Dilemma was a revelation. When I finished, I must have had 25 pages of notes.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 20, 2014

The Lean LaunchPad class teaches students how to build a Lean Startup using business model design, customer development and agile engineering. Teams have to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week.) However, going through the customer development process showed me the danger in that kind of thinking.

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Lean New York City New York Customer Development 277

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. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Jonathan Swift. What’s Wrong With Today’s Board Meetings. Board meetings that guide startups haven’t changed since the early 1900’s.

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Silicon Valley Business Model Venture Capital Balance Sheet 273

Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2010

New, agile and adroit venture firms with new business models have emerged to deal with the reality that 1) web 2.0 In either case Customer Development provides entrepreneurs with a methodology for being capital efficient. You need a plan for partnership and long term funding from day one. We live in interesting times.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

A few of the detailed case studies include: Tech legend Bill Gross building an MVP in 1999 to test demand for online car sales, which grew into CarsDirect.com. Struggling to explain the successes and failures of those companies, I discussed principles like continuous deployment, customer development, and a hyper-accelerated form of agile.

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Lean Entrepreneur San Francisco Agile 167

andrewchenblog.com

MARCH 10, 2010

Coupled with A/B testing, customer development, and thinking through business problems in a scientific, hypothesis-driven way, you end up with a powerful cocktail of techniques to build a modern startup in the most iterative way possible. If you liked this post, please subscribe or follow me on Twitter.

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Technical Review Design Las Vegas Product 47

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

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.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 27, 2011

Flip startups are agile startups that aim to exit quickly. This is lean development without any customer development. The development part is similar to a lean startup: you want to be agile. These are the times when there is more demand for startups. The focus is on building. 1: Find a Simple Idea.

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Lean Startup Agile Coder 144

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

We were going to do that by turning marketing into a machine to generate end user demand, drive the that demand into our sales channels, and educate our sales channels. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Friday, November 7, 2008 Using AdWords to assess demand for your new online service, step-by-step If you want to build an online service, and you dont test it with a fake AdWords campaign ahead of time, youre crazy. Turns out, there was aboslutely no demand whatsoever for that particular product.

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The Startup Lawyer

MARCH 17, 2012

Outsourcing your startup’s early technical development to a dev shop is like riding an elephant in a horseback polo match. You’re on a big beast, but your lack of agility will prevent you from scoring. Most of these early “partnerships” never work, regardless of how the startup compensates the dev shop.

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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