Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2008

It is becoming easier and cheaper for companies to bring products to market, leveraging free and open source software , cloud computing, open social data (Facebook, OpenSocial ), and open distribution (AdWords, SEO). Agile software development. Customer development. What is customer development?

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Steve Blank

JULY 15, 2013

Given my talks on the Secret History of Silicon Valley I was interviewed on NPR about the disclosure that the NSA said they had a new capability that tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism. Filed under: Customer Development , Secret History of Silicon Valley.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 21, 2016

It ultimately failed because she was focused on engineering the product, but didn’t validate the rest of her business model (product/market fit, distribution channel, customer acquisition, etc.). Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

A business model diagram also shows how the product gets distributed to your customers and how money flows back into your company. At Stanford, Ann Miura-Ko and I have been working on a simplified Silicon Valley version of this model. What’s the distribution channel. How do we price and position the product?

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. Customer Development , Agile Engineering and the Lean methodology enforced a process of incremental and iterative development.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 3, 2014

Like all great Silicon Valley companies they started with a technology and guessed who the customers will be. The Customer Development process, this relentless drive to turn hypotheses into facts is what makes this learning so rapid. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2009

You make several first order approximations about your business model, distribution channels, demand creation, and customer acceptance. Customer Development This strategy of starting on faith, and quickly turning them into facts is the core of the Customer Development process. Employ customer development.

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Rob Go

SEPTEMBER 9, 2013

Lean Startup Circle Boston – Meetup dedicated to the lean startup and customer development methodology. Gridco Systems – Power Distribution Systems (backed by General Catalyst and Northbridge). Dan Allred – Silicon Valley Bank (@dgallred). Great for recent grads or career switchers.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 17, 2009

I plan to apply these models to my own ventures, especially within new contexts separate from software and web development. The problem is that the most authentic innovators and entrepreneurs are in the Valley. I want more than anything to come to Silicon Valley after I graduate and join the vibrant ecosystem.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Some of the conversations went like this: Startup 1 Entrepreneur -“I’m competing against Company x and have been following the Customer Development process and I’ve talked to lots of customers.” Do you know have they distribute their product? Do you know the archetype of their customers? This is easy to test.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 3, 2009

Worries from the garage One of the worries I hear from entrepreneurs (not just my students) is that Customer Development means getting out of the building and sharing what you are working on. I was positioning the company as the second coming of the video games businesses at the intersection of “ Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley.”

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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.

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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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www.women2.org

MARCH 8, 2012

After quitting my job and starting Sorced , I spent a few months validating my business concept by creating the product mockups and doing customer development. Prior to Sorced, Elizabeth worked in business development at SecondMarket. The Alchemist Series: Customer Development and Metrics. Santa Clara, CA.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2010

The first time I taught the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship class, a quarter of the class were foreign students in a special engineering-entrepreneurship program where they took one entrepreneurship class each quarter at Stanford while working full time in technology startups in Silicon Valley.

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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.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 15, 2010

His posts are born of tremendous research into the secret history of Silicon Valley , and if you haven’t read those essays, you should. For software companies especially, scaling distribution and development is comparatively cheap. Let me be clear: Steve is the historian. The old ways aren’t working.

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 17, 2016

Silicon Valley’s pay-it-forward culture means that others will help when you’re starting up. Looking to create their accelerator/incubator, Wayne and seven other founders rented a Silicon Valley house together one summer. We found a core distribution model that worked in terms of long-tail search. …

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

It’s a particularly popular strategy in the world of product development and is used to quickly and quantitatively test a product or a product feature. Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup, popularized this strategy for web applications. Start as soon as possible.

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Steve Blank

MAY 16, 2016

In companies this would be product line extensions, more efficient supply chain, new distribution channels. Note that they plan a trip to San Diego to visit the customer. With a great assist from the State Departments innovation outpost in Silicon Valley.) Slide 2, John Boyd and the OODA Loop (finally!)

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Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Go spend some time outside the building talking to potential distribution partners. Steve I have to tell you some bad news, I just showed our potential channel partners and customers a few completed pieces of the games we had. Founders need to validate their vision in front of customers early and often. Make sure they are.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

They had an existing distribution channel and their dealers and customers thought they knew who the company was and what it stood for. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 4, 2015

First up in our speaker spotlight series is an edited transcript of our Q&A with Rocio Perez-Ochoa , co-founder of Bidhaa Sasa , a non-profit working to distribute beneficial goods to rural communities in Kenya. Fix the distribution bottleneck in rural Kenya. “My Instead, get into your customers’ mindset.

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Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

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Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

Everyone should have a chance to walk the floor looking for deals, technology, distribution, customers, etc. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Partnership Opportunities At any show you are attending there has to be tons of opportunity for business to business relationships you hadn’t thought about.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

NewTV will depend on partners like telcos to distribute the content. Given Verizon just shut down Go90 , its short form content video service, it will be interesting to see if Verizon distributes Katzenberg’s offerings.). Will these third parties produce something people will watch? But NewTV doesn’t plan on testing these hypotheses.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

So I got out out of the building to meet and understand our customers and distribution partners. I remember after a month or two of talking to 14-22 year old male gamers (our potential target market,) I realized that for the first time in my career I had no emotional connection to my customers or channel partners.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 19, 2009

I responded to their RFP by proposing that Ardent build the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center a distributed supercomputing environment with hundreds of Ardent personal supercomputers rather than a monolithic Cray supercomputer. Cray called two years ago and bought it back for parts for an unnamed customer still running one. Order Here.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 29, 2009

This is the second of three posts about the rise of “risk capital” and how it came to be associated with what became Silicon Valley. ———————– The First Valley IPO’s Silicon Valley first caught the eyes of east coast investors in the late 1950’s when the valleys first three IPO’s happened: Varian in 1956, Hewlett Packard in 1957, and Ampex in 1958.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

The trap most of them fell into (common almost everywhere): they were reading the blog posts and advice of Silicon Valley-based companies and believing that it uniformly applied to them. What’s been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a “playbook.” Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

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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. After that there’s a discussion of how the product will reach the customer and the potential distribution channel.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 15, 2016

In Silicon Valley for three decades, spent eight years as a partner at US Venture Partners. My career pretty much mirrors Silicon Valley; because I always wanted to get on the next wave. I was always curious to find out what the next developments were. But coming to Silicon Valley is not nirvana.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

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