Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2010

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. Customer Development Without Agile Engineering Is A Plan For Failure.

Customer Development 239

Customer Development Developer Customer South America 239

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

Burn Rate 252

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 252

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. Read Business Model Generation pages 1-72, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany Chapter 3. Lessons Learned.

Lean 334

Lean Web Coder Business Model 334

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. Speed keeps cash burn rate down while allowing you to converge on a repeatable and scalable business model.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

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. And what the market needed would, of course, be exactly what we had envisioned.

Lean 322

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 322

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

She was an academic on leave from Stanford now selling SAAS software to large companies, but was being inundated with marketing communications advice. “My I reminded her that all the Lean tools she learned in class–Customer Discovery, business model and value proposition canvases– contained her answer.

Marketing 318

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 318

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

MARCH 12, 2014

Therefore we needed them to think and learn about two parts of a startup; 1) ideation - how to create new ideas and 2) customer development – how do they test the validity of their idea (is it the right product, customer, channel, pricing, etc.). Hawken students practicing Customer Discovery in a mall.

Lean 335

Lean Customer Development Startup Silicon Valley 335

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. Get Out of the Building and test the Business Model. This post is part one. to get hard-earned information.

Lean 307

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. Few entrepreneurs find this scalable and repeatable business model because it’s not easy. The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 . ——-.

Early Stage 295

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 295

Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2010

Business Plan Versus Business Models. Where did the idea that startups write business plans come from? A business plan is the execution document that large companies write when planning product-line extensions where customer, market and product features are known. initial business model hypotheses).

Business Plan 320

Business Plan Business Model Customer Development Deal Flow 320

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009. Not because they have a conversion problem but because they never really nail the product or how to market it. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development?

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2011

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Market Types. The last time I wrote about Max I said, “I can’t wait to see what Max does by the time he’s 21.&# Turns out his birthday is in a week, September 7th.

Software Review 300

Software Review Early Stage Technical Review Startup 300

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2010

One of the principles of Customer Development is to get out of the building and understand the smallest feature-set customers will pay for in the first release.). Usually the cry is for more features, typically based on “Here’s what I heard from the last customer I visited.”. Steve, you’re wrong. Lessons Learned.

Customer Development 313

Customer Development Business Model Developer Search 313

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. The Lean LaunchPad class uses the three “ Lean Startup ” principles: Alexander Osterwalders “ business model canvas ” to frame hypotheses.

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

His basic point was: If someone, including me, tells you something isn’t a great idea and there’s no market for it there are only two acceptable responses. I’m going to take that thought out into the field and validate it with my customers." I saw a great post from Tristan Kromer Pivoting on Investor Feedback a.k.a

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

We want to make a bet that your Lean Launchpad class can apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification. We taught them the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack. The class textbooks were “ The Four Steps to the Epiphany and Business Model Generation.”).

Incubator 310

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 310

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What we found is that during the class almost all of them pivoted - making substantive changes to one or more of their business model canvas components. In the real world a big pivot in life sciences far down the road of development is a very bad sign due to huge sunk costs. Class starts Oct 1 st and runs through Dec 10 th.

SBIR 321

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 321

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

I spent the month of September lecturing, and interacting with (literally) thousands of entrepreneurs in two emerging startup markets, Finland and Russia. Ironically one of the things that’s holding back the Finnish cluster is Tekes , the government organization for financing research, development and innovation in Finland.

Finland 329

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 329

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Some really great stuff in 2010 that aims to help startups around product, technology, business models, etc. Steve Blank , January 25, 2010 10 Tips for Adding Game Mechanics to a Non-Gaming Service - ReadWriteStart , September 21, 2010 Startups & VCs: Learn How to Design, Market, & Eat Your Own. - First Principles.

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customer development. ———-.

San Jose 261

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 261

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

Doing so meant they would have to take risks for IP acquisition and customer/market risks outside their experience or comfort zone. 2) We should have had buy-in about the value of disruptive new business models, design and open innovation thinking. We were prematurely pushing some of the teams in the business units.

Programming 273

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 273

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. ” Fire, Ready, Aim.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2010

They start with an innovation, search for a repeatable business model, build the infrastructure for a company, then grow by efficiently executing the model. outpace an existing company’s business model. You want to start executing the business model. Companies have a fairly predictable life cycle.

Search 251

Search Agile Customer Development Technical Review 251

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad. The objective of this course is that groups of students finish with a completed software product that has real customers and an identified market.

Chile 241

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 241

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# Reply Why Startups are Agile and Opportunistic -- Pivoting the Business Model , on April 14, 2010 at 6:32 am Said: [.]

Silicon Valley 309

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 309

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. His enthusiastic response was, “This will revolutionize marketing departments!”

Silicon Valley 261

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 261

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Business Model Design. Today every business organization from startup to large company uses the words “business model.” More importantly they showed how any company’s business model could be defined in 9 boxes.

Customer Development 332

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 332

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

The product is so good, helpful, and easy to use that it literally almost does its own marketing organically through the product’s viral nature, just as Hotmail and Gmail have done since inception. If you can’t figure this out on your own, and relate it to customers succinctly, it’s a certainty that your customers never will.

Startup 334

Startup Cofounder Customer Development Viral 334

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

The teams present what they learned talking to 10-15 customer/week, and get comments, suggestions and critiques from their teaching team. We’ve recorded these panels for each part of the business model canvas. It turns out that for commercialization, the business model (Customers, Channel, Revenue Model, etc.)

Lean 266

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 266

Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

clinical utility, customer, quality of data, reimbursement, what parts of the product are valuable, roles of CRO’s , and partners, etc.,) you make substantive changes to one or more parts of your initial business model, and this new data affects your biological and clinical hypotheses. They cannot be done by proxies.

Lean 277

Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 277

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

corporation – starting a new technology division bringing disruptive technology to market at General Electric. One of GE’s new divisions – GE’s Energy Storage – has been given the charter to bring an entirely new battery technology to market. This battery works equally well whether it’s below freezing or broiling hot.

Silicon Valley 239

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 239

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010

The cause is often sales and marketing execs who’ve become too comfortable with an initial sales model and panic at the first sign of a Pivot. As a result they block new iterations of the business model that might take the company to the next level. Integrated circuits were a new market. What could go wrong?

Silicon Valley 244

Silicon Valley Technical Review Spain Engineer 244

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

Over 44 classes have embedded the business model canvas and/or Customer Discovery including a year-long course taken by every single one of its bioengineering majors. We didn’t know it at the time, but with that investment we had paid for front-row VIP seats to witness the origins of Customer Development and the Lean Startup.

Maryland 280

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 280

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyers and sellers.) Many of them had heard the phrase “product/market fit” before, but now they were living it. talk to more customers? outside of Stanford.

Customer 241

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 241

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

To do this they have to accomplish five things; 1) get deal flow – via networking and legwork, they identify likely industries, companies and teams with the potential for rapid growth (less than 10 years), 2) evaluate those companies and teams on the basis of technology, market opportunity, and team.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

For the last 10 years China essentially closed its search, media and social network software market to foreign companies with the result that Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Dropbox, and 30,000 other websites were not accessible from China. business models. business models. I can’t imagine a U.S.

China 328

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 328