Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I’m a software engineer by trade, so I’m always interested in some better way to do things, whether they are in software or in business processes or organizations. I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO.

Silicon Valley 133

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime , the first multimedia framework for a computer. The software was idiot proof.

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Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Never mind The first idea for our new company was a software product that looked something like Hypertext. Forget the Hypertext idea and come on back to California. On the ride to the airport my friend asked me what our new company was going to do. Only then did I realize we both forgot to ask. We’re building a supercomputer.”

North Carolina 133

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 133

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. Is there some defining factor that easily distinguishes the difference? Thank you for your great book.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

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. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Are These Your Slides?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

These companies would take our computers and put their name on them and resell them to their customers. Business customers were starting to ask for “office automation solutions” – word processing, spreadsheets, graphing software on a desktop. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.

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Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

But we knew something they didn’t; the total available market for color graphics boards was measurable by looking at an adjacent market, the color desktop publishing software market. Facts are the rock on which you build your strategy and tactics In a startup second-hand facts are almost as useless as opinions.

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Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 150

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. And we made sure that instead of some artificial numbers, the benchmarks truly measured performance on these four key applications our customers told us were important.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 128

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.” The reaction from our software guys was a little less kind. “Are All I had done was proudly go out and get customer input. And it’s certainly not Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 287

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

I know that this all seems obvious now with the movements started by Steven Blank ( Four Steps of Epiphany ) with the whole Customer Development processes / Lean Startup movements also popularized by people like Eric Ries. I know that their are independent software companies now focused on this like UserVoice and Get Satisfaction.

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Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One. I recently completed the Validation step (less the industry analyst presentations) and am ready to move on to Customer Creation. Can I buy you lunch to share it with you? &# Yes, I’m serious. So the ask is made — shall it be given?

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Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, etc.,) Ignore This Post The same caveat applies as in the first post; If you’re selling via the web, and trade shows seem hopelessly anachronistic, ignore this post. this may be a useful read. What didn’t?

Silicon Valley 139

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 139

Steve Blank

JANUARY 20, 2014

When Customer Development and the Lean Startup were just a sketch on the napkin, Dino Vendetti, a VC at Bay Partners, was one of the first venture capitalists I shared my ideas with. Over the years we brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Startups in Bend. Bend Startup Ecosystem.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2016

Before she was an investor, Magdalena founded two electronic commerce companies, CyberCash – a pioneer in the secure electronic payment systems, and MarketPay , an embedded payments software company. I was always curious to find out what the next developments were. It was “France is great” and “California is jug wine.”

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2016

Before she was an investor, Magdalena founded two electronic commerce companies, CyberCash – a pioneer in the secure electronic payment systems, and MarketPay , an embedded payments software company. I was always curious to find out what the next developments were. It was “France is great” and “California is jug wine.”

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Silicon Valley California Entrepreneur Cofounder 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2009

This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer Development to the Lean Startup. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup Product Development 271

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that. However, for the Web 2.0

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 140

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.

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Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

Steve Blank

JULY 19, 2016

Jim Semick , co-founder of ProductPlan , which sells web-based software for building visual product roadmaps. Jim lectures at University of California Santa Barbara and elsewhere on the process of discovering successful business models. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Peter Arvai.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Sweden 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This required convincing software vendors to move their applications to our unique machine architecture. Oh, and we had no installed customer base. I had hired the VP of marketing from a potential software partner who was responsible to get all this 3 rd party software on our computer. – was his job.

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Steve Blank

MAY 21, 2009

If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources. I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters&# memo as a board member after I saw our company at a trade show.

Silicon Valley 207

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 207

Steve Blank

JULY 11, 2016

Jessica Mah , founder of InDinero , provider of accounting software and tax services for small businesses. She left high school at 15 to attend Simon’s Rock Early College, then studied computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. I went to a customer’s office and I watched him use my software.

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Silicon Valley Entrepreneur Cofounder Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.

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Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 263

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

Customers don’t care about your tools regardless of what business you’re in. Customers of software applications don’t say, “wow, elegant code base.” Don’t confuse your passion for your tools with why your customers will buy your product. Our tools group became as important as our content group.

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Steve Blank

MAY 3, 2011

Davis , a German applied Laser research group, a California organic farm er who wanted to be an Earlyvangelist , four service partners and three weed/pest management consultants. Any hardware or software you need to buy? Include people, hardware, software, prototypes, financing, etc. How many people? Any IP you need to license?

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South Dakota Business Model Lean United States 233

Hippoland

JUNE 19, 2018

We are starting to see some doctors who are licensed to practice in California live abroad in Bali and partake in telemedicine – can we do more of this to help with patient loads from state to state and perhaps get more doctors certified in multiple states? But there are a few trends that I think fit into this space.

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San Francisco California Cost Software 48

Hippoland

JUNE 19, 2018

We are starting to see some doctors who are licensed to practice in California live abroad in Bali and partake in telemedicine – can we do more of this to help with patient loads from state to state and perhaps get more doctors certified in multiple states? But there are a few trends that I think fit into this space.

San Francisco 48

San Francisco California Cost Software 48

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Within these applications how did our customers spend their day? And since the card was useless without any application software, what other software products did they use on it? Were our products a small part of their life or large? How important was the card to them getting their own job done?

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Video Games At SuperMac , Peter Barrett was the witty and creative 24-year old Australian engineer who had designed several of our most successful products, culminating with the software for the Video Spigot. Now he wanted to go off start his own company.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. 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. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.

Silicon Valley 302

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 302

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction. BUT, they moved into a nice office off of Sand Hill Road.

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Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 233

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. Filed under: Customer Development , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F.

Agile 269

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 269

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Five Reasons You Haven’t Launched - Software By Rob , November 10, 2010 Photo by stevendepolo. It’s Easy to Be Great…It’s Hard to Be Consistent - Software By Rob , November 4, 2010 No link from TechCrunch, write-up on Mashable, mention by Leo Laporte, or Tweet by Ashton Kucher is going to make your business. This post is an accusation.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

The guidelines I had originally proposed to my students worked for enterprise software or Web 2.0 Verticals Are Different I began to realize that entrepreneurs (and their professors) act like every vertical market and industry has the same set of rules. Just for discussion, the markets I chose were: Web 2.0,

Vertical 159

Vertical Silicon Valley Intellectual Property RSS 159

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2017

In the 10 weeks the students have, Hacking for Defense hardware and software prototypes don’t advance beyond a Technology Readiness Level 4 and remain outside the scope of US export control regulations and restrictions on foreign national participation. Each of their slide presentation follow their customer discovery journey.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 11, 2008

Its important not just for historical reasons, but because we are often called upon to take sides in current debates that impact the way our region and industry will develop. Just to pick one: will software patents, NDAs and trade secrets laws make it harder for people to share knowledge outside of big companies?

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