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. The Customer Development process (and the Lean Startup) is one way to do that. Lets see why.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 22, 2011

As part of our Lean LaunchPad classes at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and for the National Science Foundation, students build a startup in 8 weeks using Business Model Design + Customer Development. Heck, in Silicon Valley even the waiters can do it.). Here’s what we found (Customer Discovery during the week).

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Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 11, 2010

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers.

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Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 252

Steve Blank

MARCH 12, 2014

We realized that past K-12 Entrepreneurial classes taught students “the lemonade stand” version of how to start a company: 1) come up with an idea, 2) execute the idea, 3) do the accounting (revenue, costs, etc.). These two startups served as the students’ introduction to customer development methodology.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 8, 2008

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, November 8, 2008 What is customer development? But too often when its time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way.

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Five Quarters of Profitability During the 1980’s and through the mid 1990’s startups going public had to do something that most companies today never heard of – they had to show a track record of increasing revenue and consistent profitability. They taught you about customers, markets and profits.

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Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

When a startup finds a repeatable sales process and steadily increasing revenue, its investors wants to harvest the rewards and build a culture of “execution.” 4) You don’t see any revenue gain past three years. 5) The customer’s needs don’t match your long term direction. Order Here. Now In Print!

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Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 218

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Tech IPO prices exploded and subsequent trading prices rose to dizzying heights as the stock prices became disconnected from the traditional metrics of revenue and profits. First Movers” didn’t understand customer problems or the product features that solved those problems (what we now call product-market fit).

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 24, 2009

Page views drive his ad revenue, which is probably CPM based. Customers walk, patients sue, and people vote. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Is this behavior an outlier or is it the norm in the PR industry? Or is it just someones end of innocence ? Mike Arrington is a capitalist. Order Here.

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Silicon Valley PR Technical Review RSS 215

Steve Blank

JULY 2, 2009

Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. Peter described the first company in which “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” and we were enthralled.

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Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 120

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

I have been working on getting a startup to revenue for a while, and while this is my 4th iteration and I have not yet succeeded, I’ve been learning new things every time. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. We’ve managed startups like this forever; there is no other way to manage them.” Order Here.

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Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 133

Steve Blank

MAY 28, 2009

a new type of graphics architecture, or a new communications chip architecture) mean you may not know if the chip performs as well as you thought until you get first silicon. These two numbers have direct impact on revenue and financial health. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here.

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Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing Customer 167

Steve Blank

MAY 26, 2009

All teams raised their hands and screamed: we hundreds of angels and dozens of VCs, all of them say they will only fund deals with prototypes, beta customers, first revenue and executive teams all in place, and they say it will be 2 years from now because their coffers are out of cash and LPs in default. Yeah, I said. Order Here.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 10, 2011

This week, the startup tribe from Harvard Business School is making their annual trek to Silicon Valley. It’s a common refrain around Silicon Valley to disparage the role of MBA’s in entrepreneurship. And for my friends in Silicon Valley, I hope you get excited about this, too. I’ll be honest.

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Silicon Valley San Francisco Lean Investment Bankers 167

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Unfortunately most startups learn this by going through the “Fire the first Sales VP&# drill: You start your company with a list of potential customers reading like a “who’s who&# of whatever vertical market you’re in (or the Fortune 1000 list.) Your board nods sagely at your target customer list. Order Here.

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Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Up and Running

DECEMBER 6, 2012

This form of planning condensed the business model onto one page and is most useful for high-growth, technically focused startups (think Silicon Valley). Also, the “customer relationships” section didn’t seem to fit for many traditional businesses. Do startups have a manual? What do you need to do to get your doors open?

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Lean Silicon Valley Forecast Technical Review 147

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

Luckily (or maybe because we were in Silicon Valley where there was a domain expert for everything) there was a very smart consultant in the retail computer space, Seymour Merrin, who preached about the importance of packaging. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.)

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VC Cafe

SEPTEMBER 5, 2012

The term “Growth Hacking”, invented by Sean Ellis , and made popular by Andrew Chen , a Silicon valley marketer and entrepreneur, is a combination of two disciplines – marketing and coding: Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?”

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SoCal CTO

DECEMBER 1, 2010

The Ultimate Combination of Startup Business Development Methods - ArcticStartup , November 16, 2010 I've been a huge fan of Steven Blank's Customer Development methodology for a long time. The Proof Is In The Revenue. Build Your Own Silicon Valley? Your First Iteration of an Idea Will Be Wrong.

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Technical Review Technology Product CTO Hire 175

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2009

This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Freemium models have their own scorekeeping.)

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Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2009

In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. After twelve months Handspring’s revenue was $170 million. They never understood Market Type. End result?

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Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 222

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 10, 2016

Being in Ohio, which lacks the startup ecosystem of an entrepreneurial cluster like Silicon Valley, made it difficult for Will to get funding for his first startup, Huddlewoo : The type of business that we were building needed an investment of capital ahead of revenue. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show.

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YoungUpstarts

OCTOBER 10, 2012

. - Customer content and engagement built rapid growth in the success of Intel ’s social media and Web-based marketing efforts, increasing “customer contacts” by a factor of tenfold and overall page views by 100x. Two studies have shown that only about 10 percent of promoters actually refer profitable new customers.

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Customer Fractional CTO Canada Technical Review 154

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 11, 2013

As Eric puts it in the webcast, “I’ve met now the CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world, and I still spend time with the CEOs of high-growth Silicon Valley companies from the garage on up, and what all those people have in common is that they are seeking out sources of sustainable growth….

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Lean Silicon Valley Agile Cofounder 167

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

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Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

The students “get out of the building” and test their hypotheses in front of potential beneficiaries using the Customer Development methodology, all while building and updating their Minimal Viable Products. For the deputy secretary, such a dialogue in Silicon Valley is not a matter of charity, but necessity.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley Washington United Kingdom Lean 120

Steve Blank

AUGUST 15, 2016

Here’s what happened: We got the product out; we got paying customers. Our revenue model was wrong. Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. We thought we figured it out.

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Cofounder Entrepreneur Africa Sales Cycle 147

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 31, 2014

But if you want to build a scalable startup you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. What’s been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a “playbook.” Business Model versus Business Plan Customer Development'

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Steve Blank

JANUARY 25, 2010

At Stanford, Ann Miura-Ko and I have been working on a simplified Silicon Valley version of this model. Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers don’t behave as you predicted. More in future posts.

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Steve Blank

MARCH 18, 2011

The signals are loud and clear : seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. They taught you about customers, markets and profits. The old rules of sustainable revenue and consistent profitability went out the window.

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Internet IPO Silicon Valley Agile 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 4, 2010

Over time the idea that winners in new markets are the ones who have been the first (not just early) entrants into their categories became unchallenged conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. Google is a $25 billion dollar company with most of its revenue from AdWords. Implicit Customer Discovery and Validation in Fast Followers.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 7, 2010

The company had innovated, found a business model, grown successfully but now even as revenues continued to grow, the company was slowly but surely dying. As the revenues grew, engineering continued to pursue sustaining innovations - incremental improvements on its core technologies. More on this in another post.). Distracted.

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Startup Lessons Learned

NOVEMBER 17, 2008

Growth - when you have existing customers, the pressure is on to grow your key metrics day-in day-out. If youre making revenue, you should be finding ways to grow it predictably month-over-month; if youre focused on customer engagement, your product should be getting more sticky, and so on. What is customer development?

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San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment DC 88

Steve Blank

AUGUST 5, 2010

I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked pretty simple. VC’s invested in things that ran on electrons: hardware, software and silicon. Quickly iterate the product in front of customers. Here’s why.

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Lean Internet Silicon Valley Venture Capital 265

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2013

Those who don’t make it into the class are offered a variety of on- and off-line tools, including government-funded translations of Steve’s nine-part Udacity.com Customer Development lectures , excerpts from the Startup Owner’s Manual in Spanish, and they’ve translated a long list of Code Academy courses and other tools as well.

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Colombia Lean Silicon Valley Coder 327

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. Yet we used the product development model not only to manage product development, but as a road map for finding customers and to time our marketing launch and sales revenue plan.

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