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.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 263

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. The first class was an introduction to the concepts of business model design and customer development. This post is part one.

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Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital.

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Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? If you can’t see the Fleetwise 2-minute video, click here.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Agile – you may find the real opportunities for your company was somewhere else. However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model.

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 230

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

JUNE 12, 2020

If you can’t see the four videos of General Mattis click here for the entire talk. How on earth would customer interviews work via video? Second, doing customer discovery via video actually increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week. But we were in for two surprises.

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Oakland Asia Lean Video 315

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.

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Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

If you want to see what all the fuss was about, you can watch complete video of last year's track courtesy of my friends at Udemy.) Luckily, in a room full of entrepreneurs, plenty of new businesses popped up to bring people food and water. (If

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Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

I know that this all seems obvious now with the movements started by Steven Blank ( Four Steps of Epiphany ) with the whole Customer Development processes / Lean Startup movements also popularized by people like Eric Ries. They recorded many of their sessions on video. Back then it seemed foreign. But they went one step further.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. Blog at WordPress.com.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.) In 21 st century terminology we’d say that Terman built the Radio Research lab into a customer-centric organization doing agile development.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 210

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I coach agile teams for a living, and I do most of my work with start-ups. I said, “well for me you’d have to add coming from a dysfunctional family.”

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 312

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.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

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

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. In 1962 Wheelon left for a new job as the first director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology where he was responsible for development of OXCART , the A-12 Spyplane, and three major satellite reconnaissance systems.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

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. You’ve got your validated learning with the customer development you’ve been doing with your own market segment. But you’re not going to your core business.

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Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

The disadvantage is that its methodology was based on the old waterfall model of product development and not the agile and lean methods that startups use today. It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. VentureWell Lean LaunchPad Master Video Library.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

The Startup Magazine

OCTOBER 29, 2018

The communication industry gives us the chance to message each other, send meeting notifications, and even engage in live video chats through their app development. There’s no doubt that app development is a popular service that benefits businesses of all types and sizes. Out of the Box vs Custom Software.

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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

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

I’d been around the web long enough to remember the dozens of companies before YouTube that tried to create crowdsourced video sites and failed. 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.

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

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. While that’s not true, it is a fact that entrepreneurs only have one word for “startup.” .

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Everyone should be articulate and agile in describing and demoing the products.) For bigger booths a good rule of thumb is to have two to four staffers for every 100 square feet of exhibit space. Even for the smallest trade show, no one shows up without booth training. Messages, themes, demo’s. What didn’t? Blog at WordPress.com.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 139

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

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. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

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). Third, the tools for customer discovery (videos, sample experiments, etc.)

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Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

I assembled this collection of free and almost free tools, class syllabi, presentations, books, lectures, videos in the hope that it can make your path as an entrepreneur or educator easier. customer development. agile engineering. Some general customer development slides click here. Free: Startup Tools.

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Open Source Silicon Valley Lean Customer Development 335

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? So the next best thing is a Video Teleconference.

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Customer Business Model Restful Video 422

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. Staying Agile. Lean Start-up Connection: Agile Development. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Lean Agile Customer Development SEO 302

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2010

When I wrote the Four Steps to the Epiphany and invented the Customer Development process, my goal was to simply explain to myself what was broken in building a startup and propose an alternative path. This business model iteration loop – the Pivot is what makes startups agile and opportunistic. It’s no longer a theory.

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Agile Customer Development Lean Business Model 236

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

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

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Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 330

Steve Blank

MARCH 7, 2012

The class is intensely and deliberately experiential to develop the mindset, reflexes, agility and resilience an entrepreneur needs to search for certainty in a chaotic world. The premise of the class is that startups, are not about executing a plan where the product, customers, channel are known.

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Lean Business Model Agile United States 263

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. —– Part 2 of the Customer Development Manifesto to follow.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one. You just get successful.

Silicon Valley 333

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 333

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2013

The Knox team was a great mix of hands-on device engineers and business development. They used agile engineering perfectly to continually test variants of their Minimum Viable Product (MVP’s) in front of customers often and early to get immediate feedback. Here’s Knox Medical’s 2 minute video summary.

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Lean Customer Development IP Agile 247

Steve Blank

JUNE 2, 2011

A revolution has taken hold as customer development and agile engineering reinvent the Startup process. The process they use to guide their search is customer development. They would: Blog their Customer Development progress as a narrative. Weekly blog of the customer development narrative.

Silicon Valley 292

Silicon Valley Business Model Early Stage Venture Capital 292

Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2019

If you can’t see the video of Palmer Luckey click here. Each of the eight teams presented a 2-minute video to provide context about their problem. Followed by an 8-minute slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey over the 10-weeks. If you can’t see the Panacea 2-minute video click here.

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Oakland Lean SBIR Afghanistan 281