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 239

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 239

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

He just hired Meg Whitman. 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. the ex-CEO of HP and eBay, as CEO of NewTV.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

These processes reduce risk to an overall organization, but each layer of process reduces the ability to be agile and lean and – most importantly – responsive to new opportunities and threats. Process helps ensure that you can deliver solutions that scale without breaking other parts of the organization. Process Versus Product.

Government 322

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 322

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

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. We hired union laborers to do that. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Customer Development and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

Technology 145

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” So, in response the company had hired a global consulting firm to help solve the problem. A shorter version of this post first appeared on the HBR blog. There’s a much better way.

Incubator 319

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 319

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

If you want app development that is both affordable and efficient, you need to know how to hire programmers to do the job. Let’s take a closer look at and how to fill the job position for your next development project in a way that brings your business the most value. The Rise of App Development in the Business World.

Developer 105

Developer Offshore Software Development Software Developers 105

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

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. Call it facts for hire. It would be a bit like the hired gun in the old west, but more suited for today’s times. You got it.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

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

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. Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference?

Customer Development 222

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) If your don’t have enough employees on the payroll, hire relatives, friends, or part-timers and train them. For bigger booths a good rule of thumb is to have two to four staffers for every 100 square feet of exhibit space. What didn’t?

Silicon Valley 139

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 139

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 ? And when do business planning and execution come into play?

Search 326

Search Business Model Customer Development Agile 326

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

I was glad to see him but it was clear over coffee that he was struggling with his first hiring failure. I’ve been running our company, cycling through Customer Discovery and Validation and the board suggested that I was running out of bandwidth and needed some help in closing our initial orders. It was deja vu all over again.

Startup 319

Startup Business Model Customer Development Bandwidth 319

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) But the rest; sales, marketing, bus dev is actually customer development that the founder needs to understand.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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. 6) Process.

Product 91

Product Technical Review Engineer CTO Hire 91

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. They hired a world-class team with co-founders and early employees who shared their vision. After that, there was no doubt to existing employees and new hires what the company was aiming for.

Hockey Stick 303

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 303

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

And it hires very smart people from the best schools. BTW, by the standards mentioned in the Times article, the following people would never have been interviewed or hired at Google. College Dropouts - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison These guys realized that customers don’t ask for your transcript. I love Google.

Silicon Valley 333

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2013

We hoped to start acquiring customers mostly through responsible, focused SEO, where we would target a variety of high-value search terms and provide relevant, useful content to users. Lean Start-up Connection: Customer Development. Staying Agile. Lean Start-up Connection: Agile Development. Validation.

Lean 302

Lean Agile Customer Development SEO 302

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.

Lean 288

Lean Business Model Agile Customer Development 288

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Surprisingly we have never explicitly articulated or understood that what’s really happening when we hire a new VP or CEO in a startup is that the newly hired executive is implicitly pivoting (radically changing) some portion of the business model. Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack.

Burn Rate 252

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 252

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. It’s because the startups are doing something very new that make them “Lean&# : These startups embrace customer and agile development that Eric Ries has been evangelizing. Here’s why. Electron-based Venture Capital.

Lean 265

Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 265

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

So what’s wrong the product development model? The first hint lies in its name; this is a product development model, not a marketing model, not a sales hiring model, not a customer acquisition model, not even a financing model (and we’ll also find that in most cases it’s even a poor model to use to develop a product.)

Customer Development 245

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

If any of the answers are “Yes,” then hire them a bit later as an early employee. 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'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

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. Align and train mentors to embrace customer development. Undergraduates can handle the class.

Developer 308

Developer Arizona Lean Business Model 308

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2020

Customer Development became one of the three parts of the Lean Startup as Eric Ries and Alexander Osterwalder provided the other two components (Agile Engineering and the business model canvas.) He had introduced the idea that customers don’t buy a product, rather than they hire it for a “job to be done.”

Lean 332

Lean Business Model Government Agile 332

SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

Intellectual Property 175

Intellectual Property Aggregator Startup Angel Investor 175

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2022

The company had hired a leading management consulting firm that helped them select 15 critical areas of change the Tsunami Initiative was tasked to work on. To succeed they realized this isn’t simply coming up with one new product. It meant pivoting an entire company – and its culture.

Framework 401

Framework Distribution Channel Leadership 401

www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Additionally, if you want to hire more engineers, how hard will it be to find people using this language. You might as well hire an outsourced team.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 7, 2013

As part of their book campaign, Brant and Patrick have teamed up with General Assembly to offer 4 free online video classes, including: Lean UX Research Techniques - Rapid Prototyping - How to Hire Developers - Growth Hacking Every book pre-order get access to all of these classes - and quite a bit more. It's a big tent.

Lean 167

Lean Entrepreneur San Francisco Agile 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. Jim Murphy is a long-time agile practitioner in startups. But startups sometimes have trouble applying agile successfully. Enter Jims post.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Steve Blank

JUNE 22, 2009

The original Hewlett Packard which made test and measurement products was spun-out and renamed Agilent. Agilent is a $5.8 It got bigger by inventing new test and measurement equipment and it hired people who knew how to execute that strategy. The remaining company kept the Hewlett Packard name and focussed on computers.

Silicon Valley 192

Silicon Valley RSS California Agile 192

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.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Noah Parsons says, “Start collecting contact information for interested, prospective customers.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 27, 2011

Flip startups are agile startups that aim to exit quickly. The idea is to build a hit that would make the founder(s) an appealing and quick talent acquisition (sometimes referred to as an acq-hire). This is lean development without any customer development. Instead, their goal is to create a promising product.

Lean 144

Lean Startup Agile Coder 144