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.” Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. Pivots and Iterations.

Customer Development 332

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 332

Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. It made more sense than our 60 page business plan predicated on a B-school class and a supernatural ability to predict the future. Focus on revenue from day one.

Customer Development 231

Customer Development Developer Customer California 231

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go” instead of detailed, formal business plans. Lean Planning started with Tim Berry ‘s 2008 “ Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan ” which was a new way for entrepreneurs to think about planning. The business plan should no longer be just a single event.

Lean 147

Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

MAY 6, 2015

They are: value proposition, product/service the company offers (along with its benefits to customers). customer segments, such as users and payers or moms or teens. distribution channels to reach customers and offer them the value proposition. customer relationships to create demand. The same is true in a Lean Startup.

Lean 120

Lean Agile Business Model Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

Everything a large company did, a startup should do – write a business plan; hire sales, marketing, engineering; spec all the product features on day one and build everything for a big first customer ship. Not kind of wrong but going out of business wrong. We now understand that’s wrong.

Restful 249

Restful Silicon Valley San Jose Puerto Rico 249

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

All teams raised their hands and screamed: we hundreds of angels and dozens of VCs, all of them say they will only fund deals with prototypes, beta customers, first revenue and executive teams all in place, and they say it will be 2 years from now because their coffers are out of cash and LPs in default. Yeah, I said.

Vertical 159

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 159

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 4, 2016

Transportation partners play an enormous role in the supply chain as they bring products into distribution centers and sometimes directly to customers. Develop Relationships with Supply Chain Partners. Develop relationships with each of your supply chain partners and make communication a top priority.

Management 145

Management Los Angeles Forecast San Francisco 145

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

We still have some collective scar tissue: the idea conjures up the hordes of dot-com hopefuls that descended on VC’s and angel investors with little more than a business plan. I hear similar things for pre-revenue startups that are on schedule, on time, and on budget - even though they are busy building something that nobody wants. (In

Silicon Valley 167

Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 14, 2014

A pivot can change any of nine different things in your business model. A pivot may mean you changed your customer segment, your channel, revenue model/pricing, resources, activities, costs, partners, customer acquisition – lots of other things than just the product. A Pivot is not just changing the product.

Business Model 333

Business Model Lean Customer Development Channel 333

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. Constructing a working business model is a form of ecosystem design. Startup founders need to use their own judgment to ask: which is the riskiest assumption underlying my business plan?

Customer 156

Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) In fact, for decades if you drew this diagram on day one of a startup VC’s would nod sagely and everyone would get to work heading to first customer ship. The Revenue Plan – The Third Fatal Assumption.

Burn Rate 252

Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 252

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 16, 2012

The idea of a Business Model competition first emerged when I realized that Business Plan writing ought to be taught in English Departments – as they’re the best example of creative writing entrepreneurs will ever do. The Business Plan ?- And your revenue plan is something more than a hallucination.

Business Model 270

Business Model Customer Development Utah Business Plan 270

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. How Does Customer Development, Agile Development and Lean Startups Fit? Business Plan Versus Business Model.

Agile 335

Agile Startup Silicon Valley Business Model 335

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2010

Many entrepreneurship courses focus on teaching students “how to write a business plan.” If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I believe that: 1) a product is just a part of a startup, but understanding customers, channel, pricing, etc. This class is not about how to write a business plan.

Wiki 318

Wiki Lean Management Business Model 318

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 327

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 327

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

VC’s worked with entrepreneurs to build profitable and scalable businesses, with increasing revenue and consistent profitability – quarter after quarter. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The Business Plan (Concept- Alpha-Beta - FCS ) became the playbook for startups. The New Exits.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

And so the spreadsheet is built with conservative assumptions, including a final revenue target. No matter how low we make the revenue projections for this new product, it’s extremely unlikely that they are achievable. That’s because the model is based on assumptions about customers that are totally unproven.

San Francisco 102

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

Colombia 292

Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 292

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2012

A business model for an existing company or division is not filled with hypotheses, it is filled with a series of facts. Operating divisions execute the known business model. Plans and processes are in place, and rules, job specifications, revenue, profit and margin goals have been set. We will propose some alternatives.

Business Model 334

Business Model Customer Development United States Operations 334

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 2, 2009

We were even more embarrassed by the pathetically small number of customers we had, and the pathetically low amount of revenue we had earned so far. We’d always cringe as we admitted that, no, we really only had a few thousand customers and a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue. Retention cohort analysis.

San Francisco 60

San Francisco Tampa Continuous Deployment Lean 60

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. Step 1: Start with a lean plan. Instead of sitting down to write a 40-page business plan, start with a one-page pitch. How to Write a Traditional Business Plan.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2011

Week 3 of the class and our teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad class were hard at work using Customer Development to get out of the classroom and test the first key hypotheses of their business model: The Value Proposition. and report the results of face-to-face customer discovery. This post is part three.

Cloud 238

Cloud Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development 238

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Entrepreneurs put together their funding presentation by extracting the key ideas from their business plan, putting them on PowerPoint/Keynote and pitching the company – until they get funded or exhausted.

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 270

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory – income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models, 5-year forecasts, etc. And they’ll do this using the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

Engineer 287

Engineer Silicon Valley United States Intellectual Property 287

Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

Last week the teams tested their Revenue Models hypotheses: what are customers willing to pay for? Partners are the external companies whose product or service combines with your Value Proposition to create a complete customer solution or “whole product&# to satisfy customers. Week 8 of the class. Veritas turbines.

South Dakota 233

South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 233

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

Vertical 126

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

In an era of “launch and learn&# is there a need for a business plan? I have seen really great product people espouse the death of the business plan. So, definition: when I talk about a business plan I’m not talking about a 40-page Word document outlining your market approach.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe more specifically how this model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. The Focus on Execution Versus Learning and Discovery The product development model assumes that customers needs are known, the product features are known, and your business model is known.

Customer Development 245

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

In the Udemy course, Alistair and Ben expand these basics into a description of how to create empathy, stickiness, virality, revenue, and scale. Stickiness, Ben and Alistair say, is where people move on too quickly--they don’t make sure they really have a product that has the right features and functionality to meet their customers’ needs.

Analytics 167

Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

They’ve found product/market fit (what products customers want to buy). They’ve learned the best distribution channel to get the product from their company to the customer. They’ve figured out the revenue model (subscription, license, direct sale, etc.) and how to price the product.

Widget 120

Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 1, 2011

From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory - income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models - seems like another planet. And they'll do this using the business model-customer development-agile development solution stack.

Silicon Valley 118

Silicon Valley Intellectual Property Balance Sheet Lean 118

Steve Blank

AUGUST 29, 2011

93% of startups that scale prematurely never break the $100k revenue per month threshold. Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan , Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Market Types. Turns out his birthday is in a week, September 7th. Happy birthday Max.

Software Review 300

Software Review Early Stage Technical Review Startup 300

Up and Running

DECEMBER 5, 2016

Lean Planning is a concept that we introduced back in 2012 as an evolution in business planning. The traditional business plan just wasn’t fitting the needs of modern, fast-moving companies and it was time to bring more of a scientific approach to business planning. It starts with “Plan-As-You-Go”.

Lean 60

Lean Silicon Valley Business Model Forecast 60

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

No Business Plan Survives First Contact With A Customer – The 5.2 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. The Proof Is In The Revenue.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

ConversionXL

JANUARY 28, 2013

Steve Blank , a Silicon Valley mentor and serial-entrepreneur, recognized for developing the customer development methodology, says it best: No plan survives first contact with customers. Sure, he was talking about business models and business plans, but it applies to websites as well.

Conversion 106

Conversion Silicon Valley Matching Design 106

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. Startups wrote business plans, generated expansive 5-year forecasts and executed (hired, spent and built) to the plan.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

MARCH 26, 2019

It’s hard to imagine, but only a decade ago, the capstone entrepreneurship class in most universities was how to write – or pitch- a business plan. In my experience, I saw that most business plans don’t survive first contact with customers. As a serial entrepreneur turned educator, this didn’t make sense to me.

Lean 256

Lean Business Model Balance Sheet Video 256