Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 30, 2009

Customer Development 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 Customer Development.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 287

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.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 233

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. The Rise of the Lean Startup.

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Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. The few who did get it felt uncomfortable using video during the interview process.

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The Lean LaunchPad Class. You may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual.

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VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

.” Steve Blank, “Is the lean startup dead?” ” The Lean Startup movement started out of necessity. Most principles of Lean Startup remain true, as described by Steve Blank in The Lean Startup Changes Everything : Business Plans are dead: Startups a series of hypothesis that need to be tested.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

We’re deep into teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The class has talked to 1,440 customers to date.). If you can’t see the video above click here. Diagnostics. This can be taught.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. OK, somehow we got them interested.

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Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. The software was idiot proof.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference The Lean Startup Conference is next week--and now that we can step back and see all the speakers and mentors, we have to say: Wow. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks. He’ll be running a hands-on session on how to make a compelling business video.

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Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 6, 2013

Once again, along with my partners at 500 Startups, we are proud to present the most substantive track at SXSW: [link] There was a running joke last year that "the Lean Startup track was the only place at SXSW you couldn't get out of the building." We're back!

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Lean Cofounder Startup Software Engineering 165

Steve Blank

JANUARY 2, 2014

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. Then reality hit.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 9, 2013

As our Lean LaunchPad for Life Sciences class winds down, a good number of the 26 teams are trying to figure out whether they should go forward to turn their class project into a business. I pointed out that the “data” you gather in 10 weeks (talking to 100+ customers, partners, payers, etc.,) see 0:30 in the video below).

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Cofounder Technical Cofounder Liquidity Event Lean 330

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building. luck… and as one of Steve Blank’s posts today mentioned, you can’t test hypotheses from within your building.

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 129

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? If you can’t see the Fleetwise 2-minute video, click here.

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Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. This is the pivot, a crucial tactical maneuver for the lean startup [.]

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Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 261

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

PS1- I run a small software startup in Brazil and just found out about Customer Development and your blog (I’ve been reading and listening to everything I can get my hands on online, like Venturehacks and Ries’ blog). You can get away with effective behavior in a large company.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 332

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

If you can’t see the four videos of General Mattis click here for the entire talk. How on earth would customer interviews work via video? Second, doing customer discovery via video actually increased the number of interviews the students were able to do each week. But we were in for two surprises.

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Oakland Asia Lean Video 315

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. After I retired, Jerry Engel , director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship , at U.C.

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SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

My 1,000th Post on This Blog - Tim Berry's Blog - Planning Startups Stories , July 21, 2010 HTML5 video markup, compatibility and playback - Niall Kennedy's Weblog , February 8, 2010 Your Product Needs a Soul - ArcticStartup , February 12, 2010 Product Friday: Monetizing Content is a Product Problem - This is going to be BIG.

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Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Steve Blank

JULY 16, 2009

The company was founded to build games with embedded video to bring Hollywood stories, characters, and narratives to a market where “shoot and die” twitch games were in vogue. But underlying the company’s existence was a fundamental hypothesis we refused to see or test - customers would care if we did.

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Silicon Valley RSS Video San Diego 223

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Customer Development ) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. Customer Development) to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions.&# My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left his office or before a meeting ended.

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Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 309

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.

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Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 245

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Engineer 224

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 224

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/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 Customer Development describes. I was an idiot.

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Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 208

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 170

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs « Customer Development Manifesto: Market Type (part 4) Customer Development Manifesto: The Path of Warriors and Winners (part 5) » 16 Responses Jon Ziskind , on September 14, 2009 at 9:19 am Said: Steve – Great post and really great advice.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

New strategic direction in companies with loyal customers have different consequences then when you had no customers Acquiring new customers are a lot more expensive that converting existing ones. Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Customer 218

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 218

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. This means you still need to have a resilient personality, and be agile. You’re not joining a big company.

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Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 230

Steve Blank

JANUARY 6, 2021

Over the weekend I got asked the best way to teach students the principles of Lean via Zoom. I realized that pre-pandemic I had put together a series of two-minute videos called “See Why.” Here’s what I suggested they offer their students: Lean in Context. No Business Plan Survives First Contact With Customers.

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Lean Customer Development Business Model Video 367

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F. Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 269

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog. Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Lessons Learned No one will tell you to work fewer hours You need to be responsible for your own health and happiness Burnout sneaks up on you Burnout is self-induced. You created it and own it. Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 206

Steve Blank

JUNE 15, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder? The other thing it helps clarify is that even at work, it’s the relationships that matter most (collegues, customers, partners, etc). The Adventure of a Lifetime.

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Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 295

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 11, 2011

He wanted to build direct customer relationships to get product feedback but only 2% of customers would ever return their registration cards. So when he saw the browser it instantly dawned on him that this would be the greatest customer development tool ever. Think YouTube vs. the rest.

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Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 11, 2011

The Lean Startup Machine looks a lot like reality television for startups. I have written previously about how powerful the these events are as a teaching tool for Lean Startup principles. Below you will find the final presentations of each of the Lean Startup Machine NYC teams, including SnappSchool, who was judged to be the winner.

New York City 161

New York City New York Lean SMS 161

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

Blog at WordPress.com. Theme: Digg 3 Column by WP Designer.

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Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213