Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “ skunk works ” project.

Video 190

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Computer hardware companies were faced with their customers asking for low-cost (relatively) desktop computers they had no experience in building. The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? what Market Type is your startup?

Technology 146

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 146

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. No, not really.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 161

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

Customer Development 256

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 256

Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. Gorbachev, now the Soviet Premier, had to grapple with the spiraling cost of military systems that weren’t amortized by consumer purchases. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 201

Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers. Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. The German objective was to make strategic bombing too costly for the Allies to continue.

Silicon Valley 211

Silicon Valley Technical Review Europe Germany 211

David Teten

APRIL 1, 2021

Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully-formed go to market function.”. Then, pluck the low-hanging fruit: easy, low-cost, and highly scalable infrastructure. Organize events in your vertical. Customer Development. AskAnything.VC

Private Equity 78

Private Equity Venture Capital Portfolio Equity 78

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. This has two major drawbacks: the central directory can become a single point of failure, and there is a performance cost for having to consult the directory ever time you want to access data anywhere in the cluster. Key-based partitioning.

San Francisco 151

San Francisco Architecture Startup Database 151

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

Vertical 140

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 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.

Vertical 126

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 427

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 427

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

As the costs of production fall, it’s getting easier and easier to send in a proposal or even a complete work. user-generated content) can increase liquidity and decrease distribution costs (notably talent search and evaluation), there are certain individuals whose opinions will count for more than the simple votes of the masses.

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

SVPG

AUGUST 30, 2013

This is not a new technique, but you may recognize it as the foundation of Customer Discovery and Customer Development. I''m talking about the power of a happy, reference customer. First, let''s be clear what it means to be a reference customer. Make no mistake about it: everything depends on strong products.

Customer 65

Customer API Brazil Germany 65

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” It’s an impressive portfolio.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Me – “Have you used Company x’s product? We’re about to ship next week.”

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 210

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

And you’d like me to do my talk on Customer Development and startups?” “No, we’re the other CIA.” On first glance it appears as if they are spending to much energy in the vertical portion of the jump, relative to the horizontal portion. Do you mean the Culinary Institute of America?

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Thailand RSS Venture Capital 271

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. Because it isn’t until after first customer ship that a startup discovers that their initial hypotheses were simply wrong (i.e.

Customer Development 246

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 246

Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. However, I think if I had understood the basics of Customer Development I might have done 5-6 startups rather than 8 to get to retirement. When I moderated my behavior it was when they were my startups.) I looked at my kids and never went back.

Entrepreneur 334

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley RSS Customer Development 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. And we decided not to.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 128

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

Sources like Crunchbase , Angel List , and Seed Invest even give this data away for free or very low cost. The VC Software Stack — the Untouched Vertical. Advances in machine learning, specifically natural language processing, have made generating these baseline, aggregate datasets possible, at scale, with high accuracy.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] They hit each other with baseball bats until one of them dropped.)

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Our calculations had us losing money on the two lowest cost boards, breaking even on the third and making great margins on the other six. As customers saw them, they were a new family of products aimed directly at the color desktop publishing market with astonishing performance and a low-cost entry price.

Silicon Valley 149

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 149

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

Customer Development 233

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 233

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. An interesting phenomena of the 1920s that illustrates the fragility and cost of vacuum tubes is the “Reflex Receiver&# design methodology.

Silicon Valley 303

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 303

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? Not enough people understand the emotional cost of being a start-up founder. The Adventure of a Lifetime. Girlfriends, wives, and moms will think you are a madman.

Entrepreneur 296

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 296

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Your results may vary.

Venture Capital 246

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 246

Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.&# One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager. the manager followed us still yelling. Let me know what you think. Comments and brickbats welcomed.

Founder 313

Founder Silicon Valley RSS China 313

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. Are his costs in control? Stay hungry, stay lean. Lessons Learned N ew buildings are a distraction.

Silicon Valley 233

Silicon Valley RSS Lean Agile 233

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Thanks for sharing the lessons you’ve learned, especially the ones where the cost is measured in years. If you are entrepreneur with a solid business that actually makes money you would know that VC has the highest cost of capital imaginable and would find better options.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2009

Or, if it really was prevented, what was the opportunity cost of choosing to prevent it ahead of time? And in most situations, there is significant cost involved in negotiating over the right estimates to plug in. One way to evaluate this fear is to spend time on analysis: how many customers will be affected?

San Francisco 133

San Francisco Architecture Lean Continuous Deployment 133

www.rocketwatcher.com

NOVEMBER 8, 2010

Costs Cost per target – targets can be free (organic traffic, internal lists) or paid (from advertising, purchased lists). Cost per prospect – given only a certain percentage of targets become prospects, what is the true cost you are paying for a prospect. If you enjoyed that, you should subscribe!

B2B 42

B2B Metrics Marketing Startup 42

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

OCTOBER 24, 2011

Because then you’d miss out on: Whether it’s better experience to build a complete, tiny startup or to do more in-depth customer development for a meatier problem. So that means stuff like thinking about what a business model might be, it does mean customer development. So I have a question for you, Jason.

Cofounder 208

Cofounder Technical Review Software Review Differentiation 208

Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

These poor miserable people who insist in making money at the cost of others, deserve our compassion, not emulation The real success I believe is leading a happy life and to hopefully provide for your worldly needs and those of your dependents. Being miserable in a big house is never better than being happy in a small one!

Silicon Valley 215

Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 215

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? Sounds like handspring.

Customer Development 223

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 223

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2009

Stanford had a Customer Development loop going on inside their own lab. The discoveries in tube and circuit research suggested new electronic intelligence and countermeasure techniques and systems; in turn the needs of the Applied Lab pushed tube and circuit development.

Silicon Valley 159

Silicon Valley RSS California Government 159

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry. Trip 1 to China to understand manufacturing landscape, potential partners and rough cost of goods. to understand distribution channel landscape, potential partners and rough cost of customer acquisition.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335