View from Seed

OCTOBER 24, 2019

As a first time founder, having a few million dollars in the bank after a successful seed raise may seem like a huge amount of capital, and it’s easy to lose discipline around your burn rate.

Dilution 149

Dilution B2B Burn Rate Early Stage 149

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

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Better to model that now.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

One of them used to be a lead developer at [insert hot consumer tech company here]. They need to raise money before building anything substantial after determining that they needed a little dough to follow the Lean Startup methodology. Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited.

Burn Rate 152

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 152

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. But in fact, most startups need to keep their burn rate low more [.] The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be.

Silicon Valley 301

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 301

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 27, 2009

In lean times, it’s most important to focus on cutting costs in ways that speed you up, not slow you down. To increase the number of iterations you have left, you can either increase cash on hand (by raising money or increasing revenues), reduce burn rate, or increase the speed of each iteration. Work in small batches.

San Francisco 117

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 117

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Stay hungry, stay lean. I don’t want to be hungry and lean (nor do I want to be full and fat). It was an odd feeling at that time, we thought we have made it and fail to stay lean and hungry. Is it a given that the “lean, hungry&# culture can actually be maintained forever? Don’t let it happen to you.

Silicon Valley 232

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 232

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Do some Customer Development instead. The product didnt convert well enough, the mainstream customers we were driving werent ready for the concept, and the event fed expectations about how successful the product was going to be that turned out to be hyper-inflated. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

The Startup Toolkit

JUNE 27, 2012

Similarly, I think that working nights & weekends is an awesome way to start doing customer development and answering the big questions about your business. That’s because, historically, the default mistake was to do the opposite & over-commit too soon.

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Burn Rate PR Campaign Hiring 35

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 30, 2009

Worse was the large staff in departments appropriate to a mainstream-scale product, especially in customer service and QA. The passionate early adopters who flocked to the product at its launch could not sustain this outsized burn rate. We can capitalize on new customers. The Lean Startup Intensive is tomorrow at Web 2.0.

San Francisco 150

San Francisco Lean Agile Continuous Deployment 150