Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. It involved building stealth aircraft to deliver these precision weapons unseen by any enemy radar, and designing intelligence and reconnaissance systems that would target for them. Smart weapons, smart sensors, and stealth.

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 201

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

We had endless arguments internally about what features it should include, how the avatars should look, and how much it should cost. Finally the day came, we unleashed the landing page, emailed our existing customers, and started advertising online. Just load them all in and choose a low cost-per-click. I used to use $.05,

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

MAY 30, 2016

And they’re getting a handle on what it costs to build a company to deliver it. But a decade earlier as undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, he was the father of the second offset strategy using software and semiconductors to build smart weapons, smart sensors, and stealth aircraft that helped end the Cold War.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego Technical Review Incubator 120

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 2, 2009

Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution. Remember that the cost of the solutions is proportional to the problem caused. I feel like I would have to introduce this by stealth.

San Francisco 164

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Software Review 164

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 3, 2009

bigs : @ericries says Stealth dev is a (undesirable, failure-presaging) customer-free zone. LeanStartup Of course, a big enabler of those kinds of mistakes is stealth-mode. Another recent meme that I hope more and more startups will take to heart: "stealth is a customer-free zone." Danger, Will Robinson.

Lean 60

Lean San Francisco Continuous Deployment Cofounder 60

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 25, 2013

Teams use the Lean Startup toolkit: the Business Model Canvas + Customer Development process + Agile Engineering. These three tools allow startups to focus on the parts of an early stage venture that matter the most: the product, product/market fit, customer acquisition, revenue and cost model, channels and partners.

Oakland 330

Oakland Incubator Lean Metrics 330

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 31, 2015

Every year, our team conducts more than 500 customer development calls to understand what challenges the community is facing. She shares: “We now use metrics like cost-per-learning and validation velocity to show progress since traditional things like ROI weren’t applicable.” Here are some of our favorites: 1.

Lean 60

Lean United States Fractional CTO Startup 60