Steve Blank

APRIL 11, 2013

– The Torch Program. In size, scale and commercial results China’s Torch Program from MOST (the Ministry of Science and Technology) is the most successful entrepreneurial program in the world. It did so by building a national network of a 1,000+ Productivity Promotion Centers. government’s SBIR and STTR programs.

Programming 179

Programming Technical Review SBIR China 179

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

What if we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently? Quite a few of the teams were building biotech, devices or digital health products. The teams that took the Lean Launchpad class – get ready for this – had a 60% success rate.

SBIR 321

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 321

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 3, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Monday, August 3, 2009 Minimum Viable Product: a guide One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product. MVP, despite the name, is not about creating minimal products. We have to manage to learn something from our first product iteration.

San Francisco 168

San Francisco Product Lean Continuous Deployment 168

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. This has been their formula for nearly 15 years.

Product 350

Product Tuvalu Dilution Incubator 350

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2012

Long before there was the Lean Startup, Business Model Canvas or Customer Development there was a guy in Santa Barbara California who had already figured it out. Frank Robinson of SyncDev has been helping companies figure out their minimum viable product and pivots since 1984, long before I even knew what it meant.

San Jose 261

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 261

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 5, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, October 5, 2008 The product managers lament Life is not easy when youre working in an old-fashioned waterfall development process, no matter what role you play. The product manager was clearly struggling to get results from the rest of the team. Lets start with what the product manager does.

San Francisco 158

San Francisco Management Software Review Product 158

Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

After seeing the process work so well for scientists and engineers in the NSF, we hypothesized that we could increase productivity and stave the capital flight by helping Life Sciences startups build their companies more efficiently. Program Director/Principal Investigator (PD/PI): The assigned PD/PI on the SBIR/STTR Phase I award.

Lean 277

Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 277

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Sunday, February 22, 2009 Please teach kids programming, Mr. President Of course, what I really mean is: let them teach themselves. See Paul Grahams Why Nerds are Unpopular to learn more) Take a look at this article on a programming Q&A site: How old are you, and how old were you when you started coding?

Programming 143

Programming San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 143

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

I’ve spent the last week in Santiago, a guest of Professor Cristóbal García at the Catholic University of Chile as part of Stanford’s Engineering Technology Venture Program. Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad. Teaching in Chile.

Chile 241

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 241

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 2, 2009

For those of you who have been following the discussion, a Lean Startup is Eric Ries ’s description of the intersection of Customer Development , Agile Development and if available, open platforms and open source. And most startup code and features end up on the floor as customers never really wanted them.

Lean 263

Lean Silicon Valley Startup RSS 263

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 20, 2011

63 scientists and engineers in 21 teams made 2,000 customer calls in 8 weeks , turning laboratory ideas into formidable startups. In July I got a call from Errol Arkilic , a program manager at the National Science Foundation (NSF), the $6.8-billion And since the rest of the slides were about Customer Development, I taught those.

Incubator 310

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 310

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

We’re changing the order in which we teach the business model canvas and customer development to better-fit therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. “Customer Development” to test the hypotheses outside the building and. Today the National Institutes of Health announced their I-Corps @ NIH program.

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

The cloud , open-source development tools and web 2.0 Startups still need capital to scale once they find good product-market fit and a repeatable-scalable business model.). Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Science and Industrial Policy , Venture Capital. Valley-sized VC funds don’t work.

Early Stage 295

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 295

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

And they were the ones who had given the program office the requirements from the outset. The way our process worked, customers were just a stakeholder that provided input – not drivers of the process. That meant that program offices were only accountable to a list of requirements, which were locked early. Up the hill!

Lean 271

Lean Technical Review Acquisition Software Review 271

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

Although the class was run completely online, and even though they were suffering from Zoom fatigue, the 10 teams of 42 students collectively interviewed 1,142 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, program managers, industry partners, etc. – while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products.

Lean 417

Lean Security Asia SBIR 417

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Another way to learn more about who’s speaking is to sort the conference program by category and find people addressing specific topics. He’s a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, which has backed Facebook, Skype, Jawbone, and dozens of other companies whose products you use. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

The UCSF Office of Innovation and Technology ( Erik Lium and Stephanie Marrus) is the reason the program exists. Therapeutics Validation = 18 months to a first deal with a potential customer – well before FDA trials, and even before preclinical stage. Digital Health Customer = typically consumer end users. This can be taught.

Lean 266

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 266

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

I am heavily indebted to earlier theorists, and highly recommend the books Lean Thinking and Lean Software Development. I also owe a great debt to Kent Beck, whose Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change was my first introduction to this kind of thinking. (So Labels: customer development , lean startup 8comments: Amy said.

Lean 168

Lean San Francisco Startup Continuous Deployment 168

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

MAY 17, 2010

If this is your attitude, your conception of tech support is completely backwards and you're missing out on important channels for marketing, product development, and sales. Yes, I'm flagrantly paraphrasing the legendary Kathy Sierra , but the idea applies as much to tech support as to product development.).

Technical Review 245

Technical Review Sales Turkey Software Review 245

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

So I asked the fatal question, “Has anyone ever looked at the customer registration cards? Has anyone ever spoken to a customer?” The one or two product mangers who should have known better glanced down at their shoes. Then someone asked, “Well, who do you think our customers are?” Ah, a leading question. If so, where?

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

ConversionXL

OCTOBER 30, 2014

Understand Your Existing Referral Analytics Before Starting A Referral Program. If I asked you what percentage of your customers came because an existing customer referred them, would you know the answer? Even without a referral program, referrals are occurring, and you should take steps to find out how they’re finding you.

Programming 107

Programming Marketing Analytics Portfolio 107

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 7, 2008

Thats the conclusion Ive come to after watching tons of online products fail for a complete lack of customers. Our goal is to find out whether customers are interested in your product by offering to give (or even sell) it to them, and then failing to deliver on that promise. Nothing made any difference.

Demand 167

Demand San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 167

Steve Blank

MAY 19, 2021

The key to understanding value propositions is in building interviews that are based on a set of hypotheses (about the problem, the stakeholder and potential solutions to be explored) and data to be captured while using minimum viable products (just enough “product” to increase the efficacy of a conversation and increase the speed of learning).

Curation 353

Curation Technical Review Lean Australia 353

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

AgileFall is an ironic term for program management where you try to be agile and lean, but you keep using waterfall development techniques. I just spent half a day with Henrich, the head of product of a Fortune 10 company. This product line has 15 project managers overseeing 60 projects. All good Lean basics.

Agile 65

Agile Lean Leadership Conversion 65

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. So their management teams were insisting that they OEM (buy from someone else) these products.

Technology 145

Technology Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 145

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Burnout can turn productive employees into emotional zombies and destroy careers. Given the hardware I had worked on at ESL, learning microprocessors wasn’t that hard but figuring out how to teach hardware design and assembly language programming was a bit more challenging. You created it and own it.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 206

Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Thursday, November 13, 2008 Five Whys Taiichi Ohno was one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System. His book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production is a fascinating read, even though its decidedly non-practical. Each five whys email is a teaching document. and so forth.

Software Review 167

Software Review Technical Review San Francisco Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 4, 2008

He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and user-generated content.

San Francisco 155

San Francisco Technical Cofounder Fractional CTO CTO 155

The Next Web

DECEMBER 30, 2012

How to Build a Startup (EP245) by Steve Blank: You’ll learn the key steps of the Customer Development process. How to identify and engage the first customers for your product, and how to gather, evaluate and use their feedback to make your product, marketing and business model far stronger. Codecademy.

Artificial Inteligence 156

Artificial Inteligence Founder Private Equity Ruby 156

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 15, 2008

In my experience, the majority of changes we made to products have no effect at all on customer behavior. This kind of result is typical when you ship a redesign of some part of your product. Without split-testing, your product tends to get prettier over time. First of all, why split-test? One last note on reporting.

San Francisco 166

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Continuous Deployment 166

Steve Blank

JUNE 12, 2020

32 students were scattered across the globe and given a seemingly impossible assignment- they had 10 weeks to understand and then solve a real Dept of Defense problem – by interviewing 100 beneficiaries, stakeholders, requirements writers, et al while simultaneously building a series of minimal viable products – all while never leaving their room.

Oakland 315

Oakland Asia Lean Video 315

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

Palantir is a deep technical play and we had a lot of code to write just to fill out the product vision that we had already validated with potential customers; it took us two straight years of development to go from early prototypes to software that could be used in production. So what was going on?

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 24, 2012

Instead, buyers are checking out product and service information in their own way, often through the Internet, their social network, or just plain word-of-mouth or customer reviews. He was building a better enterprise software product, and to get the word out, he organized ‘City Tour’ events and neighborhood ‘street teams.’

Marketing 234

Marketing Software Review Technical Review Social Network 234

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 13, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 13, 2008 SEM on five dollars a day How do you build a new product with constant customer feedback while simultaneously staying under the radar? In a mature company with a mature product, the goal is to pay for lots of people to come to your website. SEM is a simple idea.

SEM 164

SEM San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 164

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

I have personally taught many “non-technical&# people to program – graphic designers, QA folks, even artists and animators. Instead of focusing on programs designed to specifically benefit any one group, I think our focus should be on making our companies as meritocratic as possible.

San Francisco 167

San Francisco Lean Sweden Continuous Deployment 167

Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 20, 2009

I owe it originally to lean manufacturing books like Lean Thinking and Toyota Production System. The batch size is the unit at which work-products move between stages in a development process. Similar results apply in product management, design, testing, and even operations. For software, the easiest batch to see is code.

San Francisco 161

San Francisco Software Review Continuous Deployment Development Team Review 161

Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 30, 2008

If the CEO wants to completely change the product in order to serve a new customer segment, you need someone in the room who can digest the needs of the new (proposed) business, and lay out the costs of each possible approach. Labels: product development 15comments: mukund said. Have you worked with or for a great CTO?

CTO 168

CTO Fractional CTO CTO Hire Technical Review 168