Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They looked at their watches, gave our sales guy a quizzical look and left.

Technology 145

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

Everything a large company did, a startup should do – write a business plan; hire sales, marketing, engineering; spec all the product features on day one and build everything for a big first customer ship. The response was inevitably “great pipeline.” (Great pipeline means no real sales.). We now understand that’s wrong.

Restful 249

Restful Silicon Valley San Jose Puerto Rico 249

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Insufficient capital, over investment, and low sales are just some of the reasons leading to this sobering statistic. Such direct experiences allows one to test critical “leap-of-faith” assumptions about what customers like and dislike. In the US, about 50% of small businesses fail in the first five years.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

For a startup, having great sales DNA is a wonderful asset. The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. Go on an agile diet quickly.

Customer 167

Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

I hope to show why lean and agile techniques actually reduce the negative impacts of technical debt and increase our ability to take advantage of its positive effects. Just as a business incurs some debt to take advantage of a market opportunity developers may incur technical debt to hit an important deadline.

Technical Review 168

Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

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

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.

San Francisco 132

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean Agile 132

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2015

Eric was the very first practitioner of my Customer Development methodology which became the core of the the Lean methodology. Back in 2004 when Eric and his IMVU co-founder Will Harvey approached me about investing in IMVU, I agreed on one condition – they had to take my Customer Development class at UC Berkeley Haas Business School.

Lean 120

Lean Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder Channel 120

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. We set sales targets from day one, $300 the first month. As the experiments progressed, day-in-day-out we werent making sales.

San Francisco 98

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean DC 98

Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2010

To get to this Transition stage, the company needed passionate visionaries who can articulate a compelling vision, agile enough to learn and discover in real time, resilient enough to deal with countless failures, and responsive enough to capitalize on what they learned in order to secure early customers.

Agile 120

Agile Development Team Review Leadership Merger 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

With sales and marketing experiments, often you pick low-hanging fruit in the millions of dollars very, very quickly. You have to go find your own customers to experiment with, you have your own brand, so you have to think like a Lean Startup. But you’re not going to your core business.

Lean 167

Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 28, 2010

kaChing says they had the fortitude to make quick decisions and stay the course not just because they’d observed how people were using the marketplace, but also because they’d spoken with hundreds of potential and past customers. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment SEC 158

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 12, 2008

In an enterprise sales context, this is called a "repeatable and scalable sales process" - once you know how to do this, your company can graduate from early adopters and make an attempt at the mainstream. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

Audience 119

Audience San Francisco Continuous Deployment Lean 119

Steve Blank

MAY 23, 2016

Yet everyone – investors, entrepreneurs, academics — expected new startups to follow the same practices that worked for large companies – write a business plan, forecast 5-year sales projections and build the product without ever talking to customers. The National Science Foundation adopted it.

Lean 224

Lean Technical Review Vietnam Engineer 224

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Here at Palo Alto Software in 2007 and 2008, we embraced these planning concepts and moved towards a more agile planning process. ” Blank’s main innovation here is what he calls Customer Development, which is a methodology for learning and validating market needs through detailed customer communication and follow up.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Now its time to start to think seriously about how to find a repeatable and scalable sales process, how to position and market the product, and how to build a product development team that can turn an early product into a Whole Product. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 88

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

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?

Incubator 419

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 419

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

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

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

I read a ton of existing literature and came up with a formal methodology for search I called Customer Development. That resulted in a new process for Search: Customer Development + traditional product management/Waterfall Engineering. Berkeley asked me to teach a class in Customer Development.

Lean 324

Lean Georgia Michigan Business Model 324

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 22, 2010

These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. These companies produced over $52 billion dollars in sales in 2005, and employed 450,000 workers that year. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 121

San Francisco Indiana Lean Startup 121

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2014

In the last few years Agile and “Continuous Deployment” has replaced Waterfall and transformed how companies big and small build products. Agile is a tremendous advance in reducing time, money and wasted product development effort – and in having products better match customer needs.

Continuous Deployment 332

Continuous Deployment Customer Agile Cloud 332

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

“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. They suggested I get a VP of Sales to help.”. They helped me hire the best VP of Sales I could find. It was deja vu all over again.

Startup 319

Startup Business Model Customer Development Bandwidth 319

Steve Blank

JUNE 4, 2021

citizen he was now the head of sales and marketing for a company in London selling medical devices to hospitals in the UK National Health Service. health system was very different from the system in the UK, not just the regulatory regime through the FDA, but the reimbursement process and the entire sales process. salesforce.

Lean 436

Lean Agile Conversion Sales 436

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

In school I was being pounded day and night with anything that has to do with agile software development. When I entered the company, I realized that there were no process and I quickly applied what I know about agile software development. I am basically a one-man shop. Expo SF (May.

Software Review 94

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Part-Time VPE 94

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Is that a lot? I have given more than two-dozen paid speeches this year – is that a lot? Is that good? Expo SF (May.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2013

Lean Start-up Connection: Customer Development. Thousands, then millions of new customers were coming to the site through SEO, just like we’d guessed with our customer acquisition hypothesis. Once we built out a sales team, revenue also started to grow nicely. Staying Agile. Customer Development'

Lean 302

Lean Agile Customer Development SEO 302

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 8, 2009

For example, I quickly learned that when I twittered about the event, more often than not I would make a sale. That’s why we have operations alerts trigger a page, but it can also work for other customer events. And here is the howto for your sales bell: [link] Have fun! :-) June 9, 2009 1:42 AM David Skillern said.

San Francisco 84

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 84

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. General Marketing, Sales Funnel, etc.

Wiki 318

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 318

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

You can almost set your watch to six months or so after first customer ship, when Sales starts missing its “numbers,” the board gets concerned and Marketing tries to “make up a better story.” Having failed to deliver the promised revenue, the VP of Sales in a startup who does not make the “numbers” becomes an ex-VP of Sales.

Burn Rate 252

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 252

Steve Blank

JANUARY 4, 2010

Now with customers and early revenue, it was out raising its first round of venture money. Not only did their sales curve look like a textbook case of a VC-friendly hockey stick, but their Lessons Learned funding presentation was an eye-opener.). Customer and Agile development to find the business model.

Hockey Stick 303

Hockey Stick Venture Capital Startup Cofounder 303

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.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. Do you know of any similar studies showing correlation between sales success and founder success? The three dropouts above were each, in their own way, some pretty slick sales guys. You just get successful.

Silicon Valley 333

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

Large companies had VP’s of Sales and Marketing, so VC’s made startups organize that way as well. Business Plan vs. Business Model + Customer Development. The next step was getting out of the building and testing the business model in a formal process – and that process is Customer Development. It what winners do.

Business Model 270

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 270

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 17, 2009

Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. When I asked him if he actually had personally left the building and talked to these potential customers, or even had gotten them on the phone, he sounded confused. Customer needs are non-deterministic.

Metrics 243

Metrics Customer Customer Development Lean 243