Steve Blank

JUNE 25, 2009

Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. They couldn’t keep up with the fast product development times that were enabled by using standard microprocessors.

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Steve Blank

MAY 18, 2009

We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” Let me know what you think.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. on April 10, 2009 at 6:58 am Said: Amazing blog.

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Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

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. At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. It was fun watching it happen.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

No one was actually quite that good, but some VCs had “golden guts” for these kinds of operating issues. I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. “Oh Oh yes, company X, they’re having problem 343.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

It wasn’t until I found the extremely obscure Lanchester Strategy for market share that I realized that these ratios had their basis in operations research and the Lanchester’s Laws.) Our company’s graphics boards were designed to speed up a key part of the Macintosh graphics operating system called QuickDraw.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Reply bjorn , on March 23, 2009 at 5:18 pm Said: these stories really livened up the whole concept of “customer discovery&# for me. It reminded me of “earlier days&# , when I was just starting out in running business operations for startups. i have your book, but stopped at the 4th chapter.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. The Stanford records showed that his group received more funding than any other and I assumed it was for construction of these operational systems. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 27, 2009

All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. Radar engineers had observed if you cut a strip of aluminum foil to 1/2 the wavelength of a radar transmitter and throw it in front of the radars antenna, the radar signal would reflect perfectly. making nothing but jammers to put on our bombers.

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ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. Much like our digital PR offering, we started with a lean operation: We used Google Sheets to manage content operations across all accounts, along with dashboards that each client had access to. Choose to expand vertically or horizontally.

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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.

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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. But when the targets lit up, the music and chatter would stop, and the communications would get very professional.

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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. (In

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Steve Blank

APRIL 29, 2009

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty. It may not be for you.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. Do you know the archetype of their customers? Me – “Have you used Company x’s product?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 1, 2009

Top management was trying to coordinate all of the operating details (sales, manufacturing, distribution and marketing,) across all the divisions and the company almost went bankrupt that year when poor planning led to excess inventory (with unsold cars piling up at dealers and the company running out of cash.)

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 10, 2009

Navy and the CIA were the primary collectors of tactical and operational ELINT on the Soviet PVO Strany Air Defense system. ELINT Tasking The ELINT program sought answers to operational questions like: What was the Radar Order of Battle a penetrating bomber would face? During the 1950′s, the U.S. The NSA owned COMINT collection.)

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Steve Blank

MARCH 28, 2009

Now the Soviets had first hand knowledge of how their air defense systems would work against the nuclear armed B-52G and H models in an operational environment. All as an integral part of the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan – our war-fighting plan to destroy the Soviet Union. 23 to Ann Arbor when the leaves turned in the fall.

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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.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 18, 2009

My ideas about Customer Development started evolving around these concepts. However, I think if I had understood the basics of Customer Development I might have done 5-6 startups rather than 8 to get to retirement. When I moderated my behavior it was when they were my startups.) I looked at my kids and never went back.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 6, 2009

The Beginnings – “Vacuum Tube Valley&# Ecosystem circa 1950 From its founding in 1946 Stanford’s Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) did basic research into vacuum tubes that could operate at microwave frequencies. The research was funded and paid for by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and later by the Air Force and Army.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that. Do the right thing.

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Steve Blank

MAY 4, 2009

In an early stage startup, instead of sales being up front, the point departments are likely to be product development and customer development. Later on in this same company’s life, sales will become the pointy end and product development moves to a supporting role. No one was confused after that.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Ownership and Teamwork not turf. True? .&#

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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?

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news.ycombinator.com

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011

We already have some competitors in the vertical and while there is no point in trying to hide the actual idea, there are differences in the way we implement stuff that can get us an advantage over the competition. >> Illegal for them to operate trucks. Unfortunately I can only talk about the stuff related to the idea itself.

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Software By Rob

JULY 15, 2011

is a tool that helps you edge into customer development. It’s a free tool put together by Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah as a way for product owners to easily survey their customers using pre-written questions. This is great news not only for the future of our marketing, but for our product development. Photo by Eleaf.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

For example, Friendster was famously vertically partitioned at one time in its growth curve. A given customer would have an entity URL that looked like this: customer://1234 Somewhere in your API, you have a way to access data about a given customer. Im talking about the actual data-fetching operation. to store it.

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Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. The same principles operate in living as in business. A VERY nice office. Are his costs in control?

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Steve Blank

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of the Cray-1 , supercomputers were defined as the fastest vector-processing computer , one in which a single instruction performed operations on an array rather than a single number. Cray’s first customers were the U.S.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching. A match made in heaven? Not exactly.

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 19, 2013

founder paired with a mentor who had two operating companies in this space, who had developed and sold vertical market software to companies in this space, and had studied the field as an academic specialty. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching. Customer Development Teaching' Not exactly.

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