Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

You know you have achieved product/market fit when you start getting orders (or users, eyeballs or whatever your criteria for success was in your business model.) But it would have been from a profound set of founders beliefs and a serious discussion of the business tradeoffs rather than a feature list.

Customer Development 287

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 287

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The Customer is a Genius Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products. And soon the conversation were about architectural tradeoffs and then how customers didn’t appreciate the elegant designs and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of these commodity microprocessors.

Technology 145

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

The Next Web

SEPTEMBER 22, 2013

If you pick one vertical and do it well, other folks will find you. I think we erred in letting our traffic and operational concerns outstrip our business model, where simply maintaining what we had was preventing us from advancing our product.”. Find your niche. Don’t try to be everything to everyone right away.

Cofounder 164

Cofounder Founder Startup Bootstrapping 164

ConversionXL

MAY 17, 2012

The design of your website is more important for conversions than you think. You can implement any conversion boosting tactic in the world, but if it looks like crap, it won’t do you much good. Conversion to sign up increased by 300%. Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing.

Web 134

Web Design Greece Technical Review 134

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) Rob Adams, the director of MootCorp, is doing an amazing job at providing value to all participants, whether it’s feedback on their business model or making the right introductions.

Business Plan 160

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 160

Growthink Blog

FEBRUARY 27, 2010

Lee, quite simply, has forgotten WAY more about the entertainment business than most of will ever know (see his biography below). And he has graciously agreed to give us the answers to the above questions, which winning business models to run with, which losers to run from, and much, much more!

Los Angeles 85

Los Angeles Silicon Valley Technical Review Distribution 85

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had. Great founders live for these moments. Creating the Entrepreneurial Personality – A Thought Experiment Fast forward three decades back to today.

Founder 312

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 312

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

This typically includes: Relationships with relevant service providers in your vertical, often with pre-negotiated discounts: coaches, lawyers, accountants, common software vendors, consultants. A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. AskAnything.VC Minimal cost. .

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 1, 2020

This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium.

Philadelphia 62

Philadelphia Technical Review Artificial Inteligence Pennsylvania 62

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 15, 2020

This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium.

South Korea 89

South Korea Technical Review Open Source Vertical 89

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

So be sure to make a free user account and participate in the offline conversation there. As we wait for our first callers to come on board, I wanted to start with a question from a conversation that Bob and I with Merck Coulbrougiff [sounds like] from Beta List [SP]. They have 27 business units. What’s the worst case?

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs : [link] [link] [link] However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Cleveland Software Review Iowa 62

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

JANUARY 13, 2015

Often your best estimate of any metric or market behavior or business model component is at best accurate within a power of ten, for example “expected conversion rate between 0.5% You’re not going to get a 10% conversion rate from Adwords, for example. Fermi-style. So what can be shifted?

Business Model 120

Business Model Affiliate Startup Bootstrapping 120

Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium.

Technical Review 63

Technical Review Los Angeles Cofounder Silicon Valley 63

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 23, 2020

My experience is that when we engage men in the conversation and we make it personal for them?—?they This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. For now, men still control the VC checkbooks.

Technical Review 62

Technical Review Seattle Elevator Pitch Equity 62

Ben's Blog

APRIL 28, 2010

Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles. Jobs not only killed all the commodity hardware and the horizontal strategy; he went radically vertical. The transition would have been far easier if these executives running the companies had invented the old models.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 78

Austin Startup

SEPTEMBER 29, 2018

business model and team. I usually don’t back a business unless there are founders that can build, sell, and service the new solution that is being brought to market. Here are the ingredients: Business model : This is actually the most important ingredient of the five. Momentum has a way of building?—?and

Bootstrapping 52

Bootstrapping IPO Business Model Software Review 52

Austin Startup

MARCH 1, 2020

This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track , which runs March 13–17. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium.

Ireland 62

Ireland Morocco North America Philippines 62

Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 7, 2022

Marcel Petitpas (04:22): Yeah, it, it's a really tough question because so much of this comes down to the nuance of the business model, but the way that I encourage people to think about this is number one, focus on four key areas of the business. So I like that model for high risk high value work.

Cofounder 94

Cofounder Hosting Networking Software Review 94

Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2011

This week they were testing one of the most confusing sections of a company’s business model – Customer Relationships - the activities used to “Get, Keep and Grow” customers in a physical or virtual (web or mobile) channel. Using the business model canvas, the changes to their business were obvious.

Customer 264

Customer Cloud EC2 Channel 264

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 11, 2014

The black horizontal line represents time and the unlabeled vertical access represents relative profit. As you’ll see by the vertical dotted line at the far right of the graphic below as well as the dotted extension of the diagonal line, this increases your LTV (both gross and net).

Churn Rate 288

Churn Rate .Net Metrics Hosting 288

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 25, 2020

It’s very frustrating to be led through a long conversation with no substance to be told no. This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. For startups, time is our most precious commodity.

Technical Review 65

Technical Review San Francisco Artificial Inteligence Cofounder 65

Duct Tape Marketing

APRIL 14, 2022

John Jantsch (06:59): So I think there are a lot of businesses out there that instantly say, yeah, this is for me, this makes sense for my business model, but I, I'm sort of guessing that you're saying, no, everybody needs to do this. This will work for any kind of business.

Marketing 99

Marketing Affiliate Channel Software Review 99

The Startup Toolkit

JULY 13, 2013

The public version is masked in positive spin and skirts the difficulties of the situation, but it’s clear that a series of honest and difficult conversations have happened behind closed doors. Here comes the fun bit! “We will see our product line holistically, not as a set of islands.” Colour me skeptical.

Engineer 41

Engineer Vertical Framework Acquisition 41

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 1, 2023

As a founder, ask yourself – does your business actually warrant VC funding? If the answers are no, have an honest conversation with your VCs today. And they probably never will be unless business model viability is reassessed across the board. In addition, logistics is an always-on business.

Early Stage 143

Early Stage Los Angeles Silicon Valley Cofounder 143

View from Seed

JANUARY 11, 2018

We dove deep into how this investment thesis extends to major verticals of consumer spending like entertainment , clothing , and home. Troops is similarly embedded into the workflow of sales and marketing teams — it’s the glue between daily internal conversations and customer interactions. Alignable ).

B2B 120

B2B B2C Vertical Portfolio 120

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 28, 2020

In a relatively short period of time, we went from an agency business model to become a sales automation and sales accelerator technology provider. It should roll out over a series of different campaigns, deployed over a period of time, to ensure a continuous conversation about the rebranding efforts.x.

Social Media 191

Social Media Channel Vertical Partner 191

ConversionXL

APRIL 22, 2015

While testing is a critical part of conversion optimization to make sure we actually made things better and by how much, it’s also the tip of the iceberg of the full CRO picture. This comes down to the most important thing about conversion optimization – the discovery of matters. This is not where the difficulty lies.

Analytics 48

Analytics Technical Review Conversion Framework 48

David Teten

DECEMBER 3, 2019

Technographics vendors such as Builtwith , Datanyze , HG Data , Stackshare, and Stacklist help CEOs identify the right tech platform on which to build their business; they’re also helpful for investors to due diligence a company’s tech stack choices. Harvard Business School Current Research Sources for Private Equity.

Technical Review 78

Technical Review Software Review Analytics Private Equity 78

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Some of the conversations went like this: Startup 1 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and have been following the Customer Development process and I’ve talked to lots of customers.” Me – “Have you used Company x’s product? We’re about to ship next week.”

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 210

Duct Tape Marketing

OCTOBER 24, 2018

It’s the model of leadership has evolved, you know? And while companies might still organize themselves as a hierarchy, how we get work done now is less vertical and much more horizontal. So we’re working together across lines of business, across departments, across functions more than ever before.

Leadership 71

Leadership Demand Global Community 71

pandodaily.com

JULY 18, 2012

But it’s possible that as the secret sauce of new media swings farther from disruptive technology and business models to a focus on curated and quality content, it’s the older entrepreneurs who are in the pole position. Follow conversation. 25 comments. 0 people listening. Comment help. Get Livefyre. Post comment as.

Entrepreneur 45

Entrepreneur San Francisco Silicon Valley Technical Review 45

Hunter Walker

APRIL 18, 2013

Here’s why: Verticalized content needs context not just collections. Finally, even those people who’ve been able to get a bit of traffic find it hard to create a business. It’s hard to make money on other people’s video when you can’t monetize it directly.

Video 100

Video Curation Startup Metadata 100

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 17, 2020

A curious conversation over a great meal and drink. This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries. To never lose the excitement of doing something for the first time. What’s your actual super power?

Cofounder 78

Cofounder Vertical Austin Conversion 78

VC Cafe

NOVEMBER 9, 2024

Real-world example: Sierra’s AI agents can now handle entire customer service conversations, making decisions about refunds, escalations, and follow-ups without constant human oversight. The next 18-24 months will be critical as early adopters prove out use cases and business models.

Cofounder 109

Cofounder Open Source Venture Capital Stealth 109

ConversionXL

APRIL 17, 2019

Your website design is more important for conversions than you think. You can implement every conversion-boosting tactic in the world, but if your web design looks like crap, it won’t do you much good. Conversion to sign up increased by 300%. Design is not just something designers do. Design is marketing.

Web 134

Web Design Greece Conversion 134