Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring PR Agencies. Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” That’s smart I thought, a real clear charter for PR. The same is true for hiring the PR agency. They learned a ton.

PR 321

PR China Lean Channel 321

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I’ve seen many times what happens when a single department get’s holed-up in its own space, like the terrifying “ operations cave.&# Engineers are offenders in this category too, but so is any gender-segregated activity, like an all-female PR or marketing team. This is especially important across functional lines.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 19, 2013

Otherwise you run the risk of shooting yourself in the foot by operating with completely false data. Talk to your customers or prospects. You have only 10 customers? No customers at all? If you’re starting out, what you need is customer development, not conversion optimization. No problem! Conclusion.

Conversion 124

Conversion Framework Technical Review Analytics 124

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 22, 2012

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff put it best when he said that even though every company knows customer references are important, most companies have a lax approach to actually managing them. You just can’t half-heartedly paste a few new tactics on top of your current operations and expect advocates to start singing your praises.

Programming 145

Programming Customer Social Media Advisory Board 145

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Whats striking about these stories, if you get past the PR hype, are two very important themes: These prodigies were self-taught, and had a fundamental fascination with technology from a very young age. these devices all need human instruction to enable correct and desired operation.

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

crowdSPRING Blog

NOVEMBER 2, 2012

Using mTurk to interview 100 customers (in 4 hours) | Customer Development Labs - [link]. How Customers evaluate your product | StartupCFO – [link]. Avoiding operating at capacity | Gabriel Weinberg’s Blog - [link]. The Most Effective SEO Content Strategy | Duct Tape Marketing - [link].

Social Media 93

Social Media Small Business Design Media 93

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2013

They outlined their retail channel and PR strategy and told me about the type of consultants they wanted to hire. Hiring PR Agencies. Bettina said, “We want to drive customer demand into our channel.” That’s smart I thought, a real clear charter for PR. The same is true for hiring the PR agency. They learned a ton.

PR 213

PR China Lean Channel 213

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2023

Here’s how I learned why they were critical to successful customer development. I was an aggressive, young and a very tactical VP of marketing at Ardent , a supercomputer company – who really hadn’t a clue about the relationship between profound beliefs, customer discovery and strategy.

Business Model 355

Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 355

Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

Startups built every possible feature the founding team envisioned (using “Waterfall development,”) into a monolithic “release” of the product taking months or years to build a first product release. There was no repeatable methodology, startups and their VC’s still operated like startups were simply a smaller version of a large company.

Internet 335

Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2021

Shawn immediately said the name I had given the four steps was confusing – I had called it market development – he suggested that I call it Customer Development – and the name stuck. Delivery platforms are the vehicles through which customers come to interact with your product. Delivery platforms.

Product 436

Product Viral Channel San Francisco 436

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. The Product Development Diagram Emerging early in the twentieth century, this product-centric model described a process that evolved in manufacturing industries.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Product Startup RSS 271

Steve Blank

APRIL 13, 2009

And when I wasn’t reading, I was also teaching operations which gave me a pretty good understanding of what we were looking for on the other side. It had no PR agency. But when the targets lit up, the music and chatter would stop, and the communications would get very professional. ESL had no marketing people.

Silicon Valley 280

Silicon Valley RSS California Washington 280

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

You get to call all the shots, including how you want to operate the business and who you want to be involved. Noah Parsons says, “Start collecting contact information for interested, prospective customers. Develop a landing page, do some lightweight advertising, and generally reach out to as many potential customers as you can.”.

Software Review 74

Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 4, 2009

Heres a representative view from an actual Amazon customer review : We all know how to operate our own entertainment center, but what happens when you have to explain it to your babysitter, mother-in-law, or your wife? In a startup, these channels of communication are critical to understand for advertising, launch and PR purposes.

San Francisco 68

San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 68

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2010

Even worse, entrepreneurs are faced with a constant barrage of vanity metrics from competitors and other companies engaged in PR. Companies want the coverage, but they don’t actually want to reveal anything useful about their operations. The PR firm helpfully left out that context.) Vanity metrics are generally bigger.

San Francisco 154

San Francisco Metrics Lean PR 154

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

In venture capital in particular, early-stage companies are often operating in frontier industries, where the rules are unpredictable and conventional analytic frameworks may be misleading. Totem is an operating system that makes investors smarter by helping them leverage their knowledge, relationships & insights.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

Every marketing communication hire couldn’t wait to produce the next great ad or PR program. In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. In my experience, every marketer with an MBA wants to “do strategy.”

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS Non-Compete California 133

ReadWriteStart

FEBRUARY 17, 2011

Well, it turns out that to port long tail productivity apps to Google's App Engine is a somewhat cumbersome job, and requires a lot of custom development. The long tail apps can easily be ported to or developed on Google App Engine in a third of the time and cost using OrangeScape as an application platform. Enter OrangeScape.

Entrepreneur 114

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley India Massachusetts 114

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

Have they moved to their forward operating bases in the Artic?) Also seeking to learn more about the Soviet Union’s offensive weapon systems , the CIA wanted intelligence to help them understand: What type of strategic bombers did the Soviets have? How many did they have? How would they reach the U.S.? How would we know if they were coming?

Silicon Valley 178

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 178

Duct Tape Marketing

MARCH 1, 2016

Promoting your referral program that supports local non-profits is a great way to use PR to enhance your referral program. Other businesses that work with small business owners and that you either know for a fact or feel operate in a way that would make you confident in referring them to your clients and network. Steps in the system.

Lead Generation 28

Lead Generation Channel Partner Campaign 28

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 18, 2013

Publicists and those seeking PR and media attention should look elsewhere. * It''s NOT about running a small company or a shoestring operation (though those can be smart things to do!) Instead , tell us what you’ve learned. Or share what didn''t work , or what took you by surprise.

Lean 167

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 167

techcrunch.com

OCTOBER 23, 2010

This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business. I’m taking a 52 week course in how to start up, run, operate, and achieve self employment.

Technical Review 84

Technical Review Cofounder Technical Cofounder Software Review 84

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009

It took hundreds of years for newspapers to learn to behave as worthy holders of this public trust and cover the news without fear or favour, and create a firewall between news and views and the ad-sales side of the operation. I agree that listening and communicating is a key to success, but customer development can only do so much.

Community 158

Community Management Lean Software Review 158

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 12, 2009

Why do you think outsources have been happy to generate all this PR the past few years about people losing their jobs to India? Twenty years from now, operating systems might also work as a good metaphor. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup?

San Francisco 89

San Francisco Continuous Deployment Ruby Lean 89