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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how SiliconValley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how SiliconValley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did SiliconValley start?
Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.
In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe more specifically how this model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. A process to give the founders continuous customer interaction – from day one – is essential. —– Part 2 of the CustomerDevelopment Manifesto to follow.
I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the CustomerDevelopment 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.
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 CustomerDevelopment Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.
CustomerDevelopment is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” Gathering feature requests from customers is not what marketing should be doing in a startup. And it’s certainly not CustomerDevelopment.
I asked Tsutsumi-san to write a guest post for my blog to describe his experience with CustomerDevelopment in Japan. Despite my success based on talking to customers upfront, however, I wasn’t confident I could replicate startup success consistently without a clear, and repeatable process to talk to customers.
—————- The next piece of the Secret History of SiliconValley puzzle came together when Tom Byers , Tina Selig and Mark Leslie invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program ( STVP ) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. What Does WWII Have to Do with SiliconValley?
Part 1: Bend, Oregon Ecosystem and Entrepreneurs. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. Few entrepreneurs find this scalable and repeatable business model because it’s not easy. Part 2: Early-stage Regional Venture Funds.
Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of SiliconValley.” Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies , a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of SiliconValley.”
For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of CustomerDevelopment , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. The CustomerDevelopment process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that.
Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal. Watching others try to solve problems reminded me why entrepreneurs are different. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers.
CustomerDevelopment We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in SiliconValley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”
. — Teaching students to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. We wanted to teach our students how to think like entrepreneurs not accountants. The startups and the teaching team crafted a challenge for the kids to tackle using the CustomerDevelopment methodology, Lean Launchpad tools and the business model canvas.
I remember thinking, “Wow, whoever’s on the other end of phone sounds just like an entrepreneur, they were asking for the impossible.” We taught them the business model / customerdevelopment / agile development solution stack. After 7 weeks they returned to SiliconValley for their final presentations.
Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customerdevelopment? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way. Heres the catch.
to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. Steve Blanks 30 years of SiliconValley startup advice. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. Reply Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Order Here. Now In Print!
My first job in SiliconValley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. It makes you appreciate that the SiliconValley technology-centric culture-bubble has little to do with the majority of Americans.) You’re Hired, You’re Fired. Driving across the U.S. I was stunned.
Technical Marketing Years later in my career I would realize I had simply reinvented what the early pioneers in SiliconValley knew and did – hiring engineers who were domain experts who could talk as peers to customers and communicate effectively with their own company’s engineers. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S.
CustomerDevelopment ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. CustomerDevelopment) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# Reply One difference between VCs and Entrepreneurs « Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog , on April 20, 2009 at 7:06 am Said: [.]
But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in SiliconValley. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about SiliconValley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Of course “copy” is too strong a word.
Grade A Entrepreneurs , September 5, 2010 Why Krispy Kreme failed in Australia - Start Up Blog , November 3, 2010 Mellow Johnny’s: Retail Stores as Community Hubs - IDDICTIVE.COM , July 14, 2010 Is crowdfunding an option for my business?
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is misunderstanding the role of venture capital investors. There’s lots of lore, emotion, and misconceptions of what VC’s do or don’t do for entrepreneurs. In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter.
Only in SiliconValley could we have got funded with this idea, and not surprisingly, it was our technology that had the VC’s confused. His point was that it was in the VC’s interest in having entrepreneurs swing for the fences. Or “I’ve seen a lot of movies so let’s start a movie studio.”
The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or CustomerDevelopment. I am a young entrepreneur here, absolutely dying to hear the talk. Your “CustomerDevelopment Process&# has really resonated for me. The VC firm delivered a term sheet for an 8-digit second round that afternoon.
Hitting “burnout” changed the trajectory of both ends of my career in SiliconValley. Zilog Zilog was my first SiliconValley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. Recovery That weekend I left the Valley and drove along the coast from San Francisco to Monterey. The bill had come due.
In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core&# entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing. I’ve been surprised at the data. Let me know what you think.
This is a customerdevelopment problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.
Steve Blanks 30 years of SiliconValley startup advice. Filed under: SuperMac | Tagged: Early Stage Startup , Steve Blank « There’s a Pattern Here SuperMac War Story 2: Facts Exist Outside the Building, Opinions Reside Within – So Get the Hell Outside the Building » Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply.
CustomerDevelopment/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 CustomerDevelopment describes. I was an idiot. Berkeley and at Stanford.
Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. But at times it’s why entrepreneurs can sink their own companies. More on this in later posts.)
A big piece of the solution lies in the scalable impact of entrepreneurship and an increase of successful entrepreneurs. Max continued, “That’s why I’m really interested in ways of optimizing the entrepreneurship ecosystem to allow more entrepreneurs to go from idea to reality. I was feeling pretty old.
Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in SiliconValley working for my first company: ESL. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. Fred Terman Sent Us In 1953 the U.S.
Other Roles in a Startup Generic advice given to entrepreneurs assumes that everyone is going to be the founder/co-founder. Reply steveblank , on June 14, 2009 at 2:22 pm Said: Actually this is the mistake most startup entrepreneurs make – particularly in tough economic times. Get customers first.
The question is whether you are born with innate entrepreneurial talent or whether you can be taught to operate like an entrepreneur. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Jason Calacanis , founder of Mahlo.com, and Mark Suster of GRP Partners, have all weighed in on the nature side – you’re born being an entrepreneur or your not.
Steve Blanks 30 years of SiliconValley startup advice. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. I feel that I’ve derived as much value from this post as I would from reading 2 or 3 lengthy books on the topic. Reply Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print!
The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the CustomerDevelopment process are you on? CustomerDevelopment and Selling Strategy If you’ve just started your company you are in customer discovery. Hiring a VP of Sales in customer discovery typically sets a startup back.
But for the last decade “innovation” in Chinese software meant something different than it did in SiliconValley. Entrepreneurs in Beijing were knowledgeable about SiliconValley, entrepreneurship and the state of software and tools available for two reasons. Of course “copy” is too strong a word.
Filed under: CustomerDevelopment , Marketing , SuperMac , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , SuperMac « Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions Gravity Will be Turned Off » 17 Responses EricS , on May 11, 2009 at 11:05 am Said: I loved my Spigot. Steve Blanks 30 years of SiliconValley startup advice.
The percentage of marketing departments to live in the ivory tower rather than get out to meet with customers has got to be staggeringly high. Steve Blanks 30 years of SiliconValley startup advice. Reply Leave a Reply Click here to cancel reply. Order Here. To Order Outside of the U.S. Now In Print! Blog at WordPress.com.
In class I teased Todd that while the Navy had me present my Secret History of SiliconValley talk in front of 4,000 cadets at the Naval Post Graduate School , I had yet to hear from the Air Force Academy. Filed under: Air Force , CustomerDevelopment , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. I know our cadets will make us proud.
Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a SiliconValley phrase which says one thing but means another. I offered to introduce him to the firm whose Entrepreneur-in-Residence offer I had just accepted.
Most entrepreneurs today don’t remember the Dot-Com bubble of 1995 or the Dot-Com crash that followed in 2000. The mantra of “ first mover advantage ,” the idea that winners are the ones who are the first entrants in their market, became the conventional wisdom of investors in SiliconValley.“ And it may work.
Innovation outposts in SiliconValley allow big companies to sense and respond to rapid changes in technology. How to make corporate innovation work and drive success in startups were the topics of discussion with the guests on today’s Entrepreneurs are Everywhere radio show. And download any of the past shows here.).
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