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 not a conversion problem. This is a customer development problem.

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. As Lean Startup methods have been used now for a number of years, we’ve become increasingly interested in how companies use them to sustain growth. Next Tuesday, October 22 at 10a PT, we’ll take a look at this advanced entrepreneurship question.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

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. OK, somehow we got them interested.

Lean 307

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference The Lean Startup Conference is next week--and now that we can step back and see all the speakers and mentors, we have to say: Wow. He’ll talk about making a profit and making a difference in a conversation with New Media Ventures’ Christie George.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

I’ve spoken to dozens of customers, I have a validated customer persona, built an MVP to test key behavioral hypotheses, and the data doesn’t back what you’re saying." " Today I had two conversations with early stage startups (see Free CTO Consulting ). " One was an enterprise software product.

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

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. She started by sketching her business model canvas on a napkin, but somehow the conversation quickly shifted to what was really on her mind. Filed under: Customer Development.

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

“We’ve been reading your blog about your Lean Launchpad class.” No, the conversation was about to get more interesting. We want to make a bet that your Lean Launchpad class can apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification. Unlike other incubators, our Lean LaunchPad Class had a specific curriculum.

Incubator 310

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 310

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques. We’re helping them convert one of the critical product lines inside an existing division from a traditional waterfall project management process into Lean. All good Lean basics.

Agile 65

Agile Lean Leadership Conversion 65

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

This reminded me of a conversation with one of my direct reports years before my daughter was born. Our conversation went like this: Me: Jim, how are we doing with getting Ansys ported? When I explained this to him, the conversation got heated. I realized that my daughter had confused motion with action.

Silicon Valley 332

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 332

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Ditto for enterprise software companies.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

Will Price , October 11, 2010 Georgians Should Vote No - Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby , October 28, 2010 Free Software for Managing a Lean Startup - Platforms and Networks , January 17, 2010 Purpose Driven Life - Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur , July 26, 2010 Two Decade-Defining Acquisitions?

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. The most extreme case (and my personal favorite) was by Armstrong who managed to create a full single conversion superheterodyne receiver all using a single vacuum tube! Armstrong was a god!

Silicon Valley 302

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 302

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2021

To help a large Defense organization wrestle with how to increase the velocity of innovation in their ranks Steve Blank and I spent the better part of last week with our heads together reviewing everything we learned in the five years since we merged the concepts of problem curation and Lean while launching the innovation pipeline.

Curation 353

Curation Technical Review Lean Australia 353

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Extra Lucrative Conversion Advice. Conversion Optimization Services. Conversion Research. It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. I feel like “conversion rate optimization” is in 2013 what “social media marketing” was in 2009.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. I was an idiot.

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 208

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

I reminded her that all the Lean tools she learned in class–Customer Discovery, business model and value proposition canvases– contained her answer. At times, you may have to communicate what the company stands for before a customer is ready to listen to you talk about product messages. Here’s how.

Marketing 318

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 318

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

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

Oakland 315

Oakland Asia Lean Video 315

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. How can established companies benefit from implementing Lean Startup? To answer that question, we hosted a webcast conversation earlier this week with Eric Ries, Brant Cooper, and Patrick Vlaskovits. What can Lean Startup do about this?

Lean 167

Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

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 conversation shouldn't end after conversion. Your First Iteration of an Idea Will Be Wrong. What went wrong? Keep going.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

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. 2 weeks in they had outsourced my job, which lead to an awkward conversation.

Agile 269

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 269

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The Customer is a Genius Then instead of talking about our products he segued the conversation into their products. And soon the conversation were about architectural tradeoffs and then how customers didn’t appreciate the elegant designs and how the world was going to hell in a handbasket because of these commodity microprocessors.

Technology 145

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

It was always a welcome change of pace to leave the brown of the unchanging desert and travel into town and have dinner with them and have a non-technical conversation about books, theater, politics, travel, etc. Her husband would look at me out the corner of his eyes and then we’d segue the conversation to some other topic.

Silicon Valley 215

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 215

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

As the conversation began to get down to how much stock and salary we could offer van Dam, we left the barber to finish his work and went to a payphone to call our CEO to confirm the deal. Reply Karma in the Lean Startup Era , on January 28, 2010 at 5:26 pm Said: [.] The response from across the country?

North Carolina 133

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 133

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had. Great founders live for these moments. Creating the Entrepreneurial Personality – A Thought Experiment Fast forward three decades back to today. Let me know what you think. Does any of this match your experience or people you know?

Founder 312

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 312

crowdSPRING Blog

MARCH 15, 2013

Lean Business: Capacity Management, Overhead, and Your Business – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Bad Customer Development Questions and How to Avoid My Mistakes – [link]. Crowdsourced Workforces Rising | Xconomy – [link]. – [link].

Social Media 105

Social Media Small Business Design Media 105

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2013

While the Lean LaunchPad class has been adopted by Universities and the National Science Foundation , the question we get is, “Can students in K-12 handle an experiential entrepreneurship class?” They both attended our latest Lean LaunchPad Educators Class. Summary for the Lean LaunchPad in K-12 Education.

Lean 312

Lean SCRUM Ohio Cleveland 312

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

The Trojan Horse “Well…” I said hesitantly, “I’m not sure we should share this with you but we have a set of benchmarks that we use to measure performance….” Getting B-52s through the Soviet Air Defense System Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 128

ConversionXL

JANUARY 24, 2014

Today, I was fortunate enough to get Hunter Boyle – Senior Business Development Director of AWeber to talk with us about what exactly business development is, and the role it can play on conversions. In my interview with Hunter, we discuss: The key responsibilities of a business development professional.

Developer 104

Developer Cofounder API New Jersey 104

Feld Thoughts

OCTOBER 30, 2013

This was intended as a personal observation, not an ageist statement, and we devolved into a conversation about brain plasticity. At dinner last week, my long time friend Dave Jilk (we just celebrated our 30th friendship anniversary) tossed a hypothesis at me that as people age, they resist adopting new technologies. The essay follows.

Technology 168

Technology Coder Social Media Semantic 168

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Inversely, if you’re using the agency model to fund another startup or product, you should probably keep things lean. Conduct client development interviews. My agency wouldn’t have expanded beyond digital PR if it weren’t for early client conversations. Image source ).

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2014

Kauffman launched Founders School - a new education series to help entrepreneurs develop their businesses during the startup stage by highlighting how startups are different from big companies. You’ll learn how to: get to know your customers. get, keep and grow customers. Module 1, The Lean Method.

Intellectual Property 332

Intellectual Property Lean Customer Development Acquisition 332

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. Market Type changes everything. Market Type Changes Everything Here’s the point. .

Customer Development 222

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

Steve Blank

MAY 7, 2009

I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) If you are outside of Silicon Valley, you ought to jump into them with both feet. You’ll learn a lot.

Business Plan 160

Business Plan Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital 160

ConversionXL

JUNE 14, 2021

Your product or service is likely built of many features or components, but which of those do your customers truly value? Asking your most loyal customers why they keep coming back can put your marketing biases to the test. Use these conversations to understand the needs and desires your customers are struggling to fulfil.

Software Review 158

Software Review Audience Differentiation Framework 158

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2018

Five years ago we brought evidence-based entrepreneurship to Life Sciences – teaching the first Lean Lean Launchpad class at UCSF, then the NIH and Imperial College. I sat down with Arvind Gupta , Founder and Managing Director of IndieBio and talked about how Lean methods apply to Life Sciences.

Lean 252

Lean San Francisco Programming Video 252

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

If you look at the top 3 online retailers by conversion rate, none of these are award-winning designs : [link] [link] [link] However, they convert ~25% of visitors to customers. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) That’s 10x what many websites convert.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

JULY 1, 2014

When I first read about the Investment Readiness Level (IRL) on Steve’s blog, I was excited by Steve’s attempt to bridge the capital-efficient Lean Startup process for founders with the capital-raising process for funders. But the ‘ah-hah!’ Since I began incorporating the Investment Readiness Level framework I’ve made three observations.

Sacramento 314

Sacramento Framework Lean Customer Development 314