Steve Blank

AUGUST 18, 2010

Here’s his story of when Customer Development failed. We were lucky to learn about Customer Development early on in the life of our startup. More importantly, we’d witnessed Customer Development’s massive success at another local startup. So how did Customer Development fail us?

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Customer Development Developer Customer California 231

Steve Blank

MARCH 3, 2015

The disadvantage is that its methodology was based on the old waterfall model of product development and not the agile and lean methods that startups use today. It taught lean theory ( business model design , customer development and agile engineering) and practice. Seeing Is Believing. Berkeley-wide.

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Business Plan Silicon Valley Saudi Arabia Lean 120

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 1, 2021

Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups? What the winners start with is the realization that in a world of continuous disruption, they have only a few years to develop new capabilities or be pushed over the brink. Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter?

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Incubator Lean Agile Business Model 419

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. ———– Whether your venture is a new pizza parlor or the hottest new software product, beware: These nine flawed assumptions are toxic.

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Balance Sheet Business Model Customer Development Metrics 335

K9 Ventures

AUGUST 13, 2010

I tell these stories to lay the groundwork for what I am going to call Revenue Development. We’re all familiar with Product Development, and thanks to the amazing Steve Blank and Eric Ries , Customer Development has become the mantra for so many startups. In fact, that wasn’t Google’s idea at all.

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Revenue Developer Java Customer Development 72

Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

After 20 years of working in startups, I decided to take a step back and look at the product development model I had been following and see why it usually failed to provide useful guidance in activities outside the building – sales, marketing and business development. So what’s wrong the product development model?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

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.

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Silicon Valley Product Startup RSS 271

Steve Blank

JULY 29, 2013

Its goal is to take the original idea and search for a repeatable and scalable business model - first by finding product/market fit, then by testing all the parts of the business model (pricing, channel, acquisition/activation, partners, costs, etc.). They deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.

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Cofounder Advisory Board Customer Development Leadership 335

ConversionXL

JUNE 14, 2021

Conduct Jobs-to-Be-Done research (JTBD) to uncover what job your customer wants to get done with your offering. Take the search for a hat as an example. The customer isn’t necessarily looking for a hat, but for a way to block out the sun or keep their hair out of their face. Who your customers are.

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Software Review Audience Differentiation Framework 158

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2010

Now the company is in crisis mode because the rest of the organization (product development, marketing, etc.) Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack. The alternative to the traditional product introduction process is the Business Model Design and Customer Development Stack.

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Burn Rate Management Business Model Customer Development 252

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.

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Business Model Product Development Early Stage Customer Development 355

Steve Blank

AUGUST 27, 2012

He turned his PhD thesis into a killer product, got it funded and now was CEO of a company of 30. It was great to watch him embrace the spirit and practice of customer development. He was constantly in front of customers, listening, selling, installing and learning. Filed under: Customer Development.

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Founder Cofounder Advisory Board Burn Rate 323

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Modern entrepreneurship began at the turn of the 21 st century with the observation that startups aren’t smaller versions of large companies – large companies at their core execute known business models, while startups search for scalable business models. Other products used and their functions.

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Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 427

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2014

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. Somewhere in the dim past of the company, it too was a startup searching for a business model.

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IRR Startup Business Model Agile 335

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 13, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, July 13, 2009 The Principles of Product Development Flow If youve ever wondered why agile or lean development techniques work, The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Donald G. Reinertsen is the book for you.

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 153

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MARCH 11, 2014

They have many, many man-years of development and customer development in them. You have your general management meeting and in your general management meeting you talk about product development, about marketing and about finance. Edwin: I do get a lot of searches for that, by the way. Edwin: I know.

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Technical Cofounder Cofounder Software Review Management 220

Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

Only talking to real-life people will help you figure out whether you’ve got a good product, or just a solution in search of a problem, or a product in search of a market. We went door to door and even rented a kiosk in the mall to get feedback to see if people would use a product like ours.

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Software Review Software Delaware Forecast 74

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? When we build products, we use a methodology. But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit."

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Customer Development Developer San Francisco Customer 168

OnlyOnce

JUNE 20, 2013

Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development. One of Blank’s great lines in the book is that a “A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.” ” That frames the whole Lean Startup movement really, really well.

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Customer Development Developer Customer Lean 61

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invented a parallel process to product development. In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery. It’s a process that doesn’t exist in large companies with existing customers and markets.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital California 135

ConversionXL

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

Today, all things startup marketing are typically lumped under the term “growth hacking” Take a look at these “growth hacking” articles… The 6 Best Growth Hacks to Get Customers Without Having to Pay for Them by KISSmetrics. An Epic List of 100 Growth Hacks for Startups by Search Engine Journal.

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Retention Metrics Acquisition Conversion 48

Steve Blank

MARCH 11, 2015

I suggested the best place to start the conversation is with the 21 st century definition of a startup: A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Lessons Learned.

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Widget Lean Business Model Metrics 120

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 20, 2012

In this excerpt, authors Steve Blank and Bob Dorf continue to explain the Customer Discovery Philosophy (see Part One, " Is Your Startup a Valid Vision or Just a Hallucination? "). Customer discovery turns founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. They understand they have a problem.

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Customer Advisory Board Cofounder Engineer 119

VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 10, 2010

Others would go even further and say it is better to launch half a product than a half-assed product. The Four Steps to the Epiphany (highly recommended book by Steve Blank) preaches for customer development before product development, advocating a quick launch with a minimal feature set rather than a full fledged product offering.

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Lean Customer Development Audience Viral 120

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

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

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.

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Agile Customer Development Developer San Francisco 111

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 23, 2013

LSC: Tell us about the customer development you did for your book: Alistair: We''ve been thrilled at how Lean Analytics seemed to resonate with founders. LSC: What''s an example of one metric, other than revenue, that you might look at for a non-tech product? The Magic 8-Ball seldom says “Ask again later.”

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Analytics Lean Widget Metrics 167

viniciusvacanti.com

SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

I write this post to put you out of your miserable technical co-founder search and give you some realistic options. In hindsight, the $3,000 we spent basically served to keep us busy while we continued to search for a co-founder. I’ve heard that too many times over the last few years and it almost always ends badly.

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Cofounder Technical Cofounder Founder Ruby 43

YoungUpstarts

MARCH 25, 2013

by Dan Adams , author of “ New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth “ As a B2B supplier, you can approach new product development one of two ways. You can ask your customers what they want. And 2) To look for potential areas of improvement that will benefit the customer.

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B2B Customer Product Development Audio 124

Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 26, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, April 26, 2009 Product development leverage Leverage has once again become a dirty word in the world of finance, and rightly so. But I want to talk about a different kind of leverage, the kind that you can get in product development. Its a key lean startup concept. Great post!

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Product Development Developer San Francisco Product 88

Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

Startups especially can benefit by using technical debt to experiment, invest in process, and increase their product development leverage. The biggest source of waste in new product development is building something that nobody wants. Leverage product development with open source and third parties.

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Technical Review Software Review San Francisco Lean 168

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, October 20, 2008 The engineering managers lament I was inspired to write The product managers lament while meeting with a startup struggling to figure out what had gone wrong with their product development process. Good luck, engineering manager. It was painful for a lot of people.

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Software Review Engineer Management Technical Review 164

Seeing Both Sides

JANUARY 28, 2012

As I reflect on the class discussions, one of the interesting tension points that arose is the challenge an entrepreneur faces in selecting their primary product design approach. Should they follow the Steve Blank, Customer Development Process school of product development or the Steve Jobs "vision" school?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

The application of agile development methodologies which dramatically reduce waste and unlock creativity in product development. See Customer Development Engineering for my first stab at articulating the theory involved) Ferocious customer-centric rapid iteration, as exemplified by the Customer Development process.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I had the opportunity to pioneer this approach to funnel analysis at IMVU, where it became a core part of our customer development process. To promote this metrics discipline, we would present the full funnel to our board (and advisers) at the end of every development cycle. Check your assumptions, what went wrong?

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San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

If you cant find any , maybe that means you havent figured out who your customer is yet. And if you dont know who your customer is, perhaps some customer development is in order? Labels: customer development , search engine marketing 13comments: Jim Lindstrom said. What is customer development?

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