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 RSS 272

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We spent weeks working on this new product, racing the clock so it would be done in time for the real presidential debates. We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

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Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 14, 2009

Their product definition fluctuates wildly – one month, it’s a dessert topping, the next it’s a floor wax. Their product development team is hard at work on a next-generation product platform, which is designed to offer a new suite of products – but this effort is months behind schedule.

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Customer San Francisco Lean Hockey Stick 167

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. StageGate Process. Corporate KPI’s, Policy and Procedures: Innovation Killers.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

They’ve learned the best distribution channel to get the product from their company to the customer. and how to price the product. for new product development that emphasize immediate returns. Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

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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Steve Blank

MARCH 15, 2011

By now the nine teams in our Stanford Lean LaunchPad Class were formed, In the four days between team formation and this class session we tasked them to: Write down their initial hypotheses for the 9 components of their company’s business model (who are the customers? what’s the product? what distribution channel?

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. I want to talk specifics, and when you come right down to it, most technology startups dont have a very interesting cost structure.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Mass blasts of information are ineffective, because the broadcast channels are suffering from information overload (even in social media). There are too many products clamoring for attention. Test-marketing is now easier than ever before, thanks to leveraged distribution channels like AdWords and Facebook. Is that a lot?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

LSC: Tell us about the customer development you did for your book: Alistair: We''ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders. LSC: What''s an example of one metric, other than revenue, that you might look at for a non-tech product? The reality, though, is that every company today is a tech company.

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Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

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 264

Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 5, 2009

She has a separate team, with its own culture and office, and a mandate straight from top management to innovate without regard to the company’s historic products, channels, or supply chain. If it costs $0.10 to acquire an early adopter, how much should it cost to acquire a mainstream customer? But $10.00?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment Startup 102

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

In my presentation this morning, I emphasized three key areas: reducing the personal cost of failure for entrepreneurs, innovation-friendly legal reforms, and access to the digital means of production (slides from my White House presentation are available at the end of this post).

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

Starting with Facebook s developer program, social networks are all jumping on the apps bandwagon. Those apps are generating even more page views, making it quite affordable to buy application installs (which is a cost-per-action ad that requires the user to install the app before the action is considered complete).

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San Francisco Social Network Lean Continuous Deployment 68

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model - first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.). Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture.

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Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

The software was sold based on installation cost running on local servers for enterprises—which was very, very expensive. In the tactics section, list your sales channels and describe how you will be selling your products. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers. the manager followed us still yelling. And that’s just to get started. Let me know what you think.

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Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 313

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 1, 2010

When Iridium was first conceived inside Motorola in 1987, worldwide cell phone coverage was sparse, calls were unreliable and per minute costs were expensive. Cell phone handsets were the size of a lunch box and cost thousand of dollars. Customer Development, Business Model Design and Agile Development could have changed the outcome.

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Business Plan Customer Business Model Customer Development 335

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

On Sean’s GrowthHackers.com , categories include… So, essentially everything from customer development and onboarding to persuasion and social marketing fall under the umbrella of growth hacking. The key differentiator being the product-level focus vs. the channel-level focus of traditional marketing effort.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Again, its critical to focus your marketing launch on those publications, venues, and channels that your potential partners are paying attention to. Do some Customer Development instead. So dont combine your product launch with a marketing launch. Instead, do your product launch first. Help you raise money.

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San Francisco PR Lean Early Stage 168

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 14, 2009

Each of these four currencies represents a way for a customer to “pay&# for services from a company. A great product enables customers, developers, partners, and even competitors to exchange their unique currencies in combinations that lead to financial success for the company that organizes them.

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Customer San Francisco Viral Lean 156

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. You have your general management meeting and in your general management meeting you talk about product development, about marketing and about finance. All of these are about the product being badass. Edwin: I know. Jason: Okay.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In both physical and Web/mobile channels, earlyvangelists display these common characteristics: They have a problem or need. We now know this results in wasted engineering effort, time and cash, as customers don’t use, want or need most of the features developed without their input. They understand they have a problem.

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Customer Advisory Board Cofounder Engineer 119

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

We were going to do that by turning marketing into a machine to generate end user demand, drive the that demand into our sales channels, and educate our sales channels. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development.

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Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 133

maplebutter.com

JANUARY 8, 2013

what are the most crucial steps to be taken by a new tech startup when outsourcing major part of the tech to IT firms or outsourcing “product development” eg new social media website project? Near shoring development with your team (ex: your team is based in Canada / India) is cool, but not outsourcing. 1) Hire A’s.

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Technical Review Startup Cofounder Software Review 44

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

The project was so low cost they did not even want to bother with it. Also if one has a portal that is massive in ideas such as Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube combined like my own without third party back ends it cost a pretty penny to build a custom one if one did not know about clones etc.

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Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 22, 2008

Because the book is chock-full of examples of how to do this in older industries, I will focus on my experience integrating NPS into an online service, although it should be noted that it works equally well if your primary contact with customers is through a different channel, such as the telephone. What is customer development?

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.Net Operations San Francisco Lean 158

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 24, 2010

Compressing the Product Development Cycle. In the past, the time to build a first product release was measured in months or even years as startups executed the founder’s vision of what customers wanted. A hardware startup had to spend money building prototypes and equipping a factory to manufacture the product.

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Silicon Valley United States Venture Capital Software Review 335

Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

When the product and channel are bits, adoption by 10’s and 100’s of millions and even billions of users can happen in years versus decades. The second thing that’s changed is that we’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle. This might mean competing with and if necessary killing your own products.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

In the world of startups, this is like trying to sell a product to a very demanding customer who needs to see a lot of features before buying. Resegmented market (low cost variety). Heres a situation where you offer to do the job for 1/10th the cost. In fact, you cant go through traditional channels at all.

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San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89

www.quora.com

JANUARY 16, 2011

You can argue that the DNA created by Microsoft's over emphasis on distribution (Steve) and development (Bill), has ultimately cost it $50bn or more in lost revenue, market share and market capitalization. Developers have worn the crown for the last 30 or more years in the technology industry - rightly.

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Technical Review Startup CTO Hire Cofounder 51

www.vccafe.com

MARCH 11, 2013

Steve Blank on Lean Customer Development. tells you how much adwords cost. Great for visualizing work of product development. hire low-cost international engineering talent. Customer Development. Roku Channel Store. Codeacademy. Lean Methodology Sources. Steve Blank. SW Courses.

Software Review 53

Software Review Technical Review Startup 53

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. In the end, we managed to repair the damage, but only after losing a lot of time and at significant opportunity cost. We were totally unprepared for the magnitude of what happened.

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