Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

While the last post was titled “ You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job “, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.&# These hires were definitely not your standard marketing types.

Engineer 224

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 224

Steve Blank

MARCH 31, 2011

Over the last decade we assumed that once we found repeatable methodologies (Agile and Customer Development , Business Model Design) to build early stage ventures, entrepreneurship would become a “science,” and anyone could do it. it is an art) and again hired professionals. Some men see things as they are and ask why.

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Agile Customer Development Early Stage Business Model 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

They provide consulting, promotion, product testing, hiring, training and incubation services to startups. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital' Technology Business Incubators (TBIs).

Programming 287

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 287

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. The manager of the training department who hired you wasn’t authorized to do so – and he’s been fired. Could I work here if he wanted to hire me?&#

Agile 269

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 269

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 10, 2011

They’ve stopped hiring the best talent, and startups are not looking so risky compared to large companies. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital. Nokia was blind-sided in a classic disruptive innovation. Nanny-Culture, Lack of Risk Taking, Not Sharing.

Finland 332

Finland Naming Russia Government 332

Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2011

He hired an operating exec as the CEO a few years ago. With a few more questions I learned that the code base, which had now grown large, still had vestiges of the original exploratory code written back in the early days when the company was in the discovery phase of Customer Development.

Part-Time VPE 325

Part-Time VPE Agile Engineer Startup 325

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

Successful pinball companies didn’t hire Hollywood talent. Meanwhile our company was pouring an enormous amount of dollars into building tools and video compression technology, while also hiring a lot of high-priced Hollywood talent like art directors, and script and story editors. I know what’s great and what’s not.

Silicon Valley 223

Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 223

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

At Tekes, government employees (and their hired consultants) – with no equity, no risk or reward, no startup or venture capital experience – try to pick startup winners and losers. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching , Technology , Venture Capital.

Finland 329

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 329

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. In ten years, from the early 1950′s to the early 1960′s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000.

Silicon Valley 302

Silicon Valley RSS San Francisco Technical Review 302

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

He just hired Meg Whitman. Given the stock market was buying “the story and vision” of anything internet, inflated expectations were more important than traditional metrics like customers, growth, revenue, or heaven forbid, profits. the ex-CEO of HP and eBay, as CEO of NewTV.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

Founders ask me all the time whether they should hire a PR agency. Hiring a PR agency too early is a sign that the CEO is treating this as someone else’s problem. Filed under: Customer Development , Marketing. They may be individuals who organize and hold conferences where the key industry thought leaders gather.

Marketing 318

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 318

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world. Corporate elephants can dance.

Silicon Valley 239

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 239

Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

The answer depends on your answer to two questions: which step in the Customer Development process are you on? Customer Development 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.

Technology 145

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

conversionxl.com

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

It’s Not a Conversion Problem, It’s a Customer Development Problem. This is a customer development problem. So What is Customer Development? The core idea behind customer development is that the assumptions you make about a target market are only guesses. Website Analysis.

Customer Development 60

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 60

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

We didn’t know it at the time, but with that investment we had paid for front-row VIP seats to witness the origins of Customer Development and the Lean Startup. Twenty years and 100,000’s of copies of those books later, my life has fortuitously intersected with Steve Blank once again now that we’ve both become educators.

Maryland 280

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 280

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

We hired union laborers to do that. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. What’s your advice about hiring sales/marketing folks? (I The same was true for the Product Marketing group.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Zilog Zilog was my first Silicon Valley company where you could utter the customer’s name in public. I was hired as a training instructor to teach microprocessor system design for the existing Z-80 family and to write a new course for Zilog’s soon to be launched 16-bit processor, the Z-8000. You created it and own it.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 206

Steve Blank

APRIL 14, 2013

The large players like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent historically would be more likely to simply copy a startup’s features than to hire their talent. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital' It usually doesn’t end well.

China 328

China Silicon Valley Non-Compete Intellectual Property 328

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Evangelism marketing is an advanced form of word of mouth marketing (WOMM), now largely replaced by Facebook and Twitter.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

They provide consulting, promotion, product testing, hiring, training and incubation services to startups. Filed under: China , Customer Development , Technology , Venture Capital. China Customer Development Technology Venture Capital' Technology Business Incubators (TBIs).

Programming 179

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 179

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Here are just a few things you might look for: Reducing risk in young companies Bringing innovation to the enterprise Designing and running experiments Customer development strategies All conference passes are on sale right now, and you can compare them here.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

When your customers expect a turd sandwich and you deliver a turkey club with chipotle mayonnaise, you earn major bonus points, like users twittering about your service , people switching to your service because of tech support, or customers not only following your Tweets but instructing their followers to do the same.

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Steve Blank

AUGUST 22, 2011

Over the last few weeks I’ve gotten involved in hiring for two startups, a public agency and a non profit. In the last week I had four separate groups through the ranch all wanting to talk either about hiring a senior exec or a senior exec looking for a new job. Are you hiring for search or execution skills? Draw a pie chart.

Hiring 299

Hiring Non-Compete Search Customer Development 299

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 15, 2019

This typically plays out in three ways: Often the first plan from leadership for innovation is hiring management consultants who bring out their 20th-century playbook. A competitive environment should drive a company/government agency into new forms of organization that can rapidly respond to these new threats.

Government 322

Government Technical Review Acquisition Metrics 322

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

Ditch the business plan and when assumptions are proven wrong, pivot Customer Development: Build a product your customers want (vs. what you think they might need) by talking to customers and testing every aspect of the product features, pricing, etc.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

Reply steveblank , on March 28, 2009 at 7:27 am Said: Denis, Over time the blogs tagged under the “customer development&# category will build up a narrative of illustrative stories of how customer development evolved in practice. You need to hire the right type of sales people for the type of [.]

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 161

Up and Running

MARCH 21, 2018

These don’t require coding skills—they’re usually visual templates that are easy to use but don’t allow for great customization (that would require technical skills). Custom development. This means hiring/contracting a freelance web developer or an agency to design and develop your site from start to finish.

Entrepreneur 107

Entrepreneur Technical Review Hosting SEO 107

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. Call it facts for hire. It would be a bit like the hired gun in the old west, but more suited for today’s times. You got it.

Technical Review 175

Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

— I just watched a very smart company try to manage innovation by hiring a global consulting firm to offload engineering from “distractions.” So, in response the company had hired a global consulting firm to help solve the problem. A shorter version of this post first appeared on the HBR blog. There’s a much better way.

Incubator 319

Incubator Curation Engineer Government 319

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

Think about it: Companies hire people who come from outside the buyer’s world and don’t share his interests — employees, agencies, consultants, and the like — and expect them to persuade buyers to hand over their money. Build strong customer communities.

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

Feld Thoughts

NOVEMBER 18, 2013

They close on the $750k, hire a buddy or two, buy some Macs, and get to work. Things start to get a little fuzzy in terms of priorities, but not to fret, the new office is coming along really well with all of the hiring! Early customer development talks are going great which keeps the team really excited.

Burn Rate 153

Burn Rate Equity Software Review Early Stage 153

The Next Web

DECEMBER 30, 2012

How to Build a Startup (EP245) by Steve Blank: You’ll learn the key steps of the Customer Development process. How to identify and engage the first customers for your product, and how to gather, evaluate and use their feedback to make your product, marketing and business model far stronger.

Artificial Inteligence 156

Artificial Inteligence Founder Private Equity Ruby 156

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

We were impressed when we found that they did the in-person interviews by hiring usertesting.com for $39 to set up test scenarios, gave the users specific tasks to accomplish with their minimum viable product, videotaped the customer interactions and summarized customer likes and dislikes.)

Customer 241

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 241