Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.

Customer Development 166

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Whether they’re using a formal process to search for a business model like Customer Development or just trial and error, startup founders are intuitively goal-seeking to optimize their business model. The Customer Development model that I write and teach about is the entrepreneur’s version of Boyds’ OODA loop.).

Business Model 335

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 335

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

If you want to take your business to the next level, you should consider app development. Either way, custom software development is an effective way to build brand awareness and give your business a competitive edge. While app development can be very beneficial, that’s only true if it’s done the right way.

Developer 93

Developer Offshore Software Developers Software Development 93

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. So by popular demand, here’s a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto. for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model.

Customer Development 331

Customer Development Developer Customer Cofounder 331

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA « Steve Blank (tags: startup) [.] Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA. Steve Blank, Agile Opportunism – Entrepreneurial DNA: … entrepreneurs instinctualy realize that the best advocate for their careers is themselves [.] You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Reply Create.

Agile 268

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 268

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

For decades this revered business magazine described management techniques that were developed in and were for large corporations – offering more efficient and creative ways to execute existing business models. Each of these authors ( along with others too numerous to mention) profoundly changed my view of management and strategy.

Technical Review 331

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 331

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques. He realized that traditional Waterfall development wasn’t appropriate when the problem and solution had many unknowns.a. This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

Agile 65

Agile Lean Leadership Conversion 65

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

My contract developers building the app aren’t very responsive. He was using 3 rd parties to build his app but he had no expertise on how to manage external developers. The emphasis on the rapid development and iteration of MVP’s is to speed up how fast you can learn ; from customers, partners, network scale, adoption, etc.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

They needed to be sure that what they were building was what customers wanted and needed. And if their initial guesses were wrong, they needed a process that would permit them to change early on in the product development process when the cost of changes was small – the famed “pivot”. The result? Carpe Diem – Seize the Cash.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

And over time every venture capitalist develops their own gut feel for what makes up a great team in their industry. For example, if you’re building a mobile app, then the key activities are: app software development, user interface design and demand creation skills. Filed under: Customer Development.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

For decades this revered business magazine described management techniques that were developed in and were for large corporations – offering more efficient and creative ways to execute existing business models. Each of these authors ( along with others too numerous to mention) profoundly changed my view of management and strategy.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 223

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

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 4, 2010

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 4, 2010 Kent Beck keynote, "To Agility, and Beyond" Kent Beck will give the opening keynote at the Startup Lessons Learned conference on April 23. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development. Kent is a significant figure in the field of software development.

Agile 99

Agile Software Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 99

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 6, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 6, 2008 Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile I thought Id share an interesting post from someone with a decidedly anti-agile point of view. Steveys Blog Rants: Good Agile, Bad Agile : "Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective.

Agile 76

Agile San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment 76

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. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us?

Customer Development 231

Customer Development Developer Customer California 231

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

We think teaching teams a formal methodology around the Lean Framework (Business Model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) is a natural evolution of how successful incubators/accelerators will build startups. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Lean 322

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 322

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. And you’ll learn about how to build a minimal viable product to get feedback early and often from customers.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley was brave enough to let me write and teach a class on a subject that no one had ever heard of – Customer Development. Customer Development was a process to quickly search for a profitable business model when customer needs (features, pricing, channel, etc.)

Customer Development 244

Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 244

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

Product Development 153

Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

Repeat, learning whether to iterate, pivot or restart until you have something that customers love. Waterfall Development. While it sounds simple , the Build Measure Learn approach to product development is a radical improvement over the traditional Waterfall model used throughout the 20 th century to build and ship products.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

HR processes, legal processes, financial processes, acquisition and contracting processes, security processes, product development and management processes, and types of organizational forms etc. By process I mean all the tools that allow companies and government to scale repeatable execution. Process Versus Product.

Government 322

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 322

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.

Customer Development 255

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 255

Steve Blank

JANUARY 27, 2011

student of our MS&E department at Stanford ,) where they are set on being a leader in developing the management science of entrepreneurship. This startup search process is the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. The 47th (-46) Annual Business Model Competition.

Business Model 285

Business Model Utah Intellectual Property Agile 285

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? What the winners start with is the realization that in a world of continuous disruption, they have only a few years to develop new capabilities or be pushed over the brink. Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter? The short answer is no.

Incubator 419

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 419

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. what you think they might need) by talking to customers and testing every aspect of the product features, pricing, etc. Agile Development: launch an MVP early and iterate quickly.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

Agile 334

Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 334

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad. The objective of this course is that groups of students finish with a completed software product that has real customers and an identified market.

Chile 241

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 241

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. This methodology forces rapid hypothesis testing and Customer Development by getting out of the building while building the product. And since the rest of the slides were about Customer Development, I taught those.

Incubator 310

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 310

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

If you’ve been reading my book on Customer Development and follow my work on Market Type , this type of innovation is best for adding new products to existing markets. In fact the people a large firm needs for this kind of innovation looks suspiciously like startup founders and the processes needed look like Customer Development.

Search 251

Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 251

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.

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world. Corporate elephants can dance.

Silicon Valley 238

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 238

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 325

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. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Teams talk to 10-15 customers a week and make a minimum of 100 customer visits.

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

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. Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?

Lean 307

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

The Startup Magazine

SEPTEMBER 22, 2020

However, these technological developments have also presented a special opportunity for companies to understand what their customers need and how they interact with their businesses. It has also made it easy for them to deliver content to different devices, hence reaching a large number of customers.

API 107

API Media Agile Technical Review 107

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. As a result, the standard product development model is not only useless, it is dangerous.

Customer Development 221

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 221

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Berkeley were heavily funded to develop Cold War weapon systems. Starting in the 1950’s, Stanford’s engineering department became “outward facing” and developed a culture of spinouts and active faculty support and participation in the first wave of Silicon Valley startups. Seeing Is Believing. Berkeley-wide. We’ve gone global as well.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120