Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

When we looked at the color graphics board market, our competitors had defined the market as one measured by technical metrics: screen resolution, number of bits of color, screen refresh rates, acceleration, etc. It didn’t take much imagination to realize that what we had to do was to tell our story around one key metric performance ?

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 161

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

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

If that’s you, by all means hire a VP of Sales with a great rolodex and call on established mainstream companies – and ignore the rest of this post. The notion of “Market Type&# is there so startups have a metric of when to spend marketing and sales dollars. I cover this in the Four Steps to the Epiphany.)

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

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. shoes in order to deduce possible competitors’ moves and anticipate customer needs. What do you think?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

And the final lesson was that we were keeping score on our packaging with the wrong metrics – it wasn’t about awards, it was about sales in the retail channel. Initially your job is to understand each of the parts of your business model before you hire someone to do it.

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Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

Steve Blank

MAY 14, 2012

The excerpts, which appeared first at Inc.com , highlight the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in our book. Financial progress is tracked using metrics like income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. Executing on a sales and marketing plan.

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Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. So hiring more people and being around more people and getting more things done is not actually one of the reasons. What I mean by that is startups nowadays that raise money have absolutely ludicrous metrics. Lots of things change.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

ConversionXL

MARCH 28, 2014

In another study, Wistia dug into the visitor data for their own homepage video & found that roughly 30% of their video views came from prospective customers. ” The visitor/view metric is one you should only be competing against yourself on. If you’re doing animation: hire a professional.

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Video Software Review Cofounder Metrics 122

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Also, make a bullet list of the marketing activities that will drive customers to your door. If you don’t yet have a team yet, list the roles you need to hire for. Noah Parsons says, “Start collecting contact information for interested, prospective customers.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

ConversionXL

MARCH 4, 2020

Don’t choose metrics that are similar but not the same. Otherwise, it’s easy to turn a small discrepancy into a massive issue—one that torches year-over-year data comparisons and just about all of your quarterly (even annual) metrics. Every tool has its own methods for various metrics. Why does it happen? Image source ).

Analytics 88

Analytics Metrics IP Conversion 88

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.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

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.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Occam's Razor

APRIL 8, 2013

To win in business you need to follow this process: Metrics > Hypothesis > Experiment > Act. We are far too enamored with data collection and reporting the standard metrics we love because others love them because someone else said they were nice so many years ago. That metric is tied to a KPI.

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Metrics Analytics Lean Churn Rate 157

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 7, 2013

in developing these new models. We believe that using the customer development process to monetize these assets through new business models can create huge competitive advantage and more speed to market for us and other big companies. Using an alternative process including different systems and metrics is key.

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Lean Nepal Cofounder Customer Development 331

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 21, 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. First of all, it’s not fair to say that how much capital you’ve raised is a vanity metric, because it is real, right?

Widget 204

Widget Cofounder Technical Review Software Review 204

Seeing Both Sides

JULY 11, 2013

Before this occurs, the sales process is a craft or an art - custom-made by the founder or evangelist sales VP. You dive deep into a customer development process, working closely with a few customers who feed you requirements and are willing to trial an imperfect product that is evolving quickly. 1) Enterprise Sales.

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Sales Technical Review Software Review B2B 50

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

JUNE 15, 2010

Do they “get&# Customer Development ? They understand that now’s not the time to hire a senior VP of Sales to start to scale the sales force or to look for a finance department to create income statements that say zero each month. Do They Get Customer Development? Have they heard about Customer Development ?

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Founder Vesting Later Stage Early Stage 232

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2014

In that case, metrics and analytics are really important. LK: At that point, it''s all about early user research and customer development. I think there''s a really nice method for doing this, which is imagine your successful customer. Don''t just imagine them, use metrics to figure out who they are.

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SoCal CTO

JULY 13, 2011

This site aggregates and filters content from thought leaders who talk about topics such as Marketing , Sales , Design , Revenue , Hiring , Social Media , Business Models , Metrics , PR , Venture Capital , Angel Investors , Bootstrapping , Incubators , Agile and many others.

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Intellectual Property Aggregator Startup Angel Investor 175

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. Additionally, if you want to hire more engineers, how hard will it be to find people using this language. You might as well hire an outsourced team.

Cofounder 47

Cofounder Technical Review San Francisco Founder 47

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

September, 2012 – Andrew Chen, who currently does growth at Uber , writes You don’t need a growth hacker , which encourages companies to really consider whether they have product-market fit before hiring a growth hacker. Without metrics or data, a growth hacker can feel out of place and uncomfortably exposed.

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Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Austin Startup

FEBRUARY 24, 2018

Much of the writing on startups focuses on two elements: finding product-market fit scaling the company once #1 is accomplished For product-market fit, we have a lot of source material to work with from the last decade: Steve Blank’s leadership on Customer Development , and Eric Ries’ on the Lean Startup ?—?along and they will.

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Warrant Bootstrapping Framework Hiring 48

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

An investor had few hard metrics other than the actual financials, and little technology to make the process scaleable. Over the past few decades, better metrics became available, and investors could take a more analytical, data-driven approach. ” Historically, investing was a manual, artisan process.

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Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? 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.

Customer Development 168

Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

You need to have some sort of plan for testing to see how it’s affecting key metrics , whether those are revenue, retention, registration, user happiness, or some other number you care about. Hire me to help you learn how to get better information from your customers. How Am I Going to Get Feedback on this Feature?

Software Review 40

Software Review Agile San Francisco Metrics 40

ReadWriteStart

MARCH 27, 2011

The idea is to build a hit that would make the founder(s) an appealing and quick talent acquisition (sometimes referred to as an acq-hire). This is lean development without any customer development. Lastly, large companies that seek new talent will likely hire promising individuals through a small exit.

Lean 144

Lean Startup Agile Coder 144

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 5, 2010

I believe it is the best introduction to Customer Development you can buy. As all of you know, Steve Blank is the progenitor of Customer Development and author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany. You can imagine how well that worked. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 166

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, September 7, 2008 Customer Development Engineering Yesterday, I had the opportunity to guest lecture again in Steve Blank s entrepreneurship class at the Berkeley-Columbia executive MBA program. Its a nice complement on the product engineering side to his customer development methodology.

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Customer Development Engineer San Francisco Developer 131

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 23, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Wednesday, December 23, 2009 Why vanity metrics are dangerous In a previous post, I defined two kinds of metrics: vanity metrics and actionable metrics. In this post, Id like to talk about the perils of vanity metrics. My personal favorite vanity metrics is "hits."

Metrics 167

Metrics San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 16, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, March 16, 2009 Combining agile development with customer development Today I read an excellent blog post that I just had to share. In most agile development systems, there is a notion of the "product backlog" a prioritized list of what software is most valuable to be developed next.

Agile 111

Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, January 19, 2009 Lean hiring tips In preparing for the strategy series panel this week, I have been doing some thinking about costs. And all of that cost was caused by one activity: hiring. Hiring is no different from any other company process. Sounds a little abstract, though, doesnt it?

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Lean Hiring San Francisco Continuous Deployment 140

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

Focus on the output metrics of that part of the product, and you make the problem a lot more clear. I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. Labels: customer development , split-test 7comments: Editor said.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

After all, if you already have an all-male startup, you’re already at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring the very women that could fix that imbalance. And yet, when I suggest this practice to hiring managers and recruiters alike, they rarely do it. Beyond hiring, our actual work process matters, too.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 29, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 29, 2008 The ABCDEFs of conducting a technical interview I am incredibly proud of the people I have hired over the course of my career. This second objective plays no small part in allowing you to hire the best. Hiring decisions are among the most difficult, and the most critical.

San Francisco 146

San Francisco Lean Agile Java 146

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 22, 2008

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco CPA SEM CTO Hire 167

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

At least, not in the traditional sense of trying to squeeze every tenth of a point out of a conversion metric or landing page. Instead, we try to accelerate with respect to validated learning about customers. Even if it shows improvement in some micro metric, does that invalidate the overall design? No one feature is to blame.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154