Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?”

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

Steve Blank

JULY 25, 2023

Now at Imperial College Business School and Co-Founder of the Wicked Acceleration Labs , Cristobal and I wondered if we could combine the tenets of Lean (get out of the building, build MVPs, run experiments, move with speed and urgency) with the expanded toolset developed by researchers who work on Wicked problems and Systems’ Thinking.

Lean 295

Lean Chile Ukraine Spain 295

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Are there customers for what you are building? How many are there?

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 270

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

Over the weekend I got asked the best way to teach students the principles of Lean via Zoom. I realized that pre-pandemic I had put together a series of two-minute videos called “See Why.” Here’s what I suggested they offer their students: Lean in Context. No Business Plan Survives First Contact With Customers.

Lean 367

Lean Customer Development Business Model Video 367

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

We’re deep into teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The class has talked to 1,440 customers to date.). We’ve recorded these panels for each part of the business model canvas.

Lean 266

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 266

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

For decades this revered business magazine described management techniques that were developed in and were for large corporations – offering more efficient and creative ways to execute existing business models. Business-as-usual management techniques focused on efficiency and execution are no longer a credible response.

Technical Review 331

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 331

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2015

—– Lean Innovation Management. In the last five years “ Lean Startup ” methodologies have enabled entrepreneurs to efficiently build a startup by searching for product/market fit rather than blindly trying to execute. The result will be: a new, Lean version of the Three Horizons of Innovation. Here’s how.

Lean 120

Lean Management Business Model Incubator 120

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The Lean LaunchPad Class. You may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

Customer Development 287

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 287

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

Lean 322

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 322

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. 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.

Lean 307

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

Customer Discovery. As the farm fields flew by on the interstate I listened as Dave described how he translated his vision into a series of hypotheses and mapped them onto a business model canvas. As the miles sped by I explained to Dave that he had understood only two of the three parts of what makes a Lean Startup successful.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum. We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and.

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

For decades this revered business magazine described management techniques that were developed in and were for large corporations – offering more efficient and creative ways to execute existing business models. Business-as-usual management techniques focused on efficiency and execution are no longer a credible response.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 223

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 Build $10-30M funds.

Early Stage 295

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 295

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

Today, I want to introduce you to a new concept for starting and growing successful companies: Lean Planning™. Before I dive too deeply into the Lean Planning methodology, it makes sense to talk about its history and where it comes from. It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go” instead of detailed, formal business plans.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

This is a customer development problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

We’re going to test this hypothesis by teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The teams that took the Lean Launchpad class – get ready for this – had a 60% success rate.

SBIR 321

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 321

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

Surprisingly if you’ve filled out the business model canvas you already know who you need. I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. Filed under: Customer Development. Customer Development'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 24, 2014

—— The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses and agile engineering to build minimum viable products. Alexander Osterwalder wrote it.

Business Model 335

Business Model Design Customer Development Lean 335

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 6, 2014

The concepts in my Lean LaunchPad curriculum can be taught in a variety of classes–as an introduction to entrepreneurship all the way to a graduate level “ capstone class.”. Our Lean LaunchPad class requires student teams to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week while they’re building the product.

Lean 286

Lean Customer Development Business Model Email 286

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

I am always surprised when critics complain that the Lean Startup’s Build, Measure, Learn approach is nothing more than “throwing incomplete products out of the building to see if they work.”. It’s time to update Build, Measure, Learn to what we now know is the best way to build Lean startups. Here’s how. Build-Measure-Learn.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2019

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of this century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models, while startups search for scalable business models. This new framework can act as the front-end of Customer Development.

Lean 334

Lean Marketing Agile Customer Development 334

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

Vision Synching in a Lean Startup The Fallacy of Customer Development Entrepreneurs, Lower Investors’ Risk by Validating your Start-up Company’s Business Proposition Lessons Learned: What is customer development? billion dollar mistake. billion dollar mistake.

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, September 8, 2008 The lean startup Ive been thinking for some time about a term that could encapsulate trends that are changing the startup landscape. After some trial and error, Ive settled on the Lean Startup. I like the term because of two connotations: Lean in the sense of low-burn.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This was followed by an 8-minute slide presentation describing their customer discovery journey over the 10 weeks. While all the teams used the Mission Model Canvas , (videos here ), Customer Development and Agile Engineering to build Minimal Viable Products, each of their journeys was unique.

Lean 416

Lean Security Asia SBIR 416

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

“We’ve been reading your blog about your Lean Launchpad class.” We want to make a bet that your Lean Launchpad class can apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification. The Innovation Corps – Using the Lean LaunchPad as an Incubator for Scientists and Engineers. Wow, that’s nice, I thought, a call from a fan.

Incubator 310

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 310

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Try innovating inside a large company where 99% of the company is executing the current business model, while you’re trying to figure out and build what comes next. And they also recognize that simply exploiting their existing assets, capabilities, and business models is insufficient for long-term survival.

Incubator 419

Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 419

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

Entrenched Innovation Model Issues : Qualcomm’s existing innovation model – wireless products were created in the R&D lab and then handed over to existing business units for commercialization – was wildly successful in the existing wireless and mobile space. Developing a program to generate new ideas is the easy part.

Programming 273

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 273

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

Berkeley Haas Business School is a leader in entrepreneurship education. It has replaced how to write a business plan with hands-on Lean Startup methods. 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.

Business Plan 120

Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2013

The Harvard Business Review is offering free reprints of the May 2013 cover article, “ Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything “ Available here.

Lean 333

Lean Venture Capital Customer Development Startup 333

Steve Blank

JANUARY 2, 2014

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them.

Lean 250

Lean Algorithm Customer Development IP 250

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2013

The Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship curriculum has caught fire. It dawned on me that the plans were a symptom of a larger problem: we were executing business plans when we should first be searching for business models. So what would a search process for a business model look like? Victor Hugo. In 2003 U.C.

Lean 295

Lean Agile Customer Development Business Model 295

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2021

Founders of startups (and new ventures inside existing companies) are searching for product/market fit and a repeatable and scalable business model. An entrepreneur must start with the belief that all their assumptions are simply hypotheses that will undoubtedly be challenged by what they learn from customers. I did both!).

Lean 436

Lean Agile Business Model Business Plan 436

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

We just finished our Lean LaunchPad class at UC Berkeley’s engineering school where many of the teams embedded machine learning technology into their products. Machine Learning Meets Lean – Berkeley Lean LaunchPad Class. Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development.

Artificial Inteligence 325

Artificial Inteligence Lean Exit Strategy Startup 325

Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2010

I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School since the fall of 2004 and in a joint MBA with Columbia since 2005. Back in 2004, Jerry Engel the head of the Entreprenuership program at Haas Business School at U.C. A lot has happened since I first authored and taught the class. Four Steps.

Customer Development 244

Customer Development Lean Developer Customer 244

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

But to give you a sense of how fast they are moving, it’s only been a week since I posted the syllabus for our new Stanford entrepreneurship class Engr245 ( The Lean Launchpad.) Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad.

Chile 241

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 241