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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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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Steve Blank

MAY 9, 2017

I’ve seen the Valley grow from Sunnyvale to Santa Clara to today where it stretches from San Jose to South of Market in San Francisco. I’ve watched the Valley go from Microwave Valley – to Defense Valley – to Silicon Valley to Internet Valley. So how did this happen? Where is it going?

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

Most publishers are still caught up in an outdated “vision vs. metrics&# argument, which is already obsolete here in Silicon Valley. What is the right revenue model? The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? In other words, what is the minimum viable product ?

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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 292

Steve Blank

JULY 28, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. This approach would shape Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money). Yet this system isn’t perfect. – seems like another planet.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do. Customer Development.) Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 18, 2016

While these acquisitions have teams of great researchers, they rarely contribute actual revenue generating products (because most never reached that stage when they were acquired.) Get of the building and test those hypotheses using customer development. I had all that in mind as we watched our teams present.

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Steve Blank

MAY 17, 2011

Years later this area would become known as Silicon Valley. But I learned that in Silicon Valley, honest failure is a badge of experience. In 1999… with the company’s revenue north of $100 million…I handed the keys to a new CEO and left. My third story is about Failure and Redemption.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 16, 2009

I was in New York last week with my class at Columbia University and several events made me realize that the Customer Development model needs to better describe its fit with web-based businesses. In it, I got asked a question I often hear: “What if we have a web-based business that doesn’t have revenue or paying customers?

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Steve Blank

JUNE 5, 2018

Some examples of innovation tools are Customer Development, Design Thinking, User-Centric Design, Business Model Canvas, Storytelling, etc. In addition, companies and agencies have set up I nnovation Outposts (most often located in Silicon Valley) to be closer to relevant technology and then to invest, partner or buy.

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Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2009

In the last three posts, we drew the relationship of market risk and invention risk with vertical markets and pointed out verticals where customer development would be useful. In contrast to simply executing your business plan, the Customer Development process is built on low-cost and continuous learning and iterating.

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Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 5, 2009

Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. Product Development – Getting Funded as The Goal In a traditional product development model, entrepreneurs come up with an idea or concept, write a business plan and try to get funding to bring that idea to fruition.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

We did that when we surveyed our customers. And in this very unique case, we figured out how to maximize revenue and profit by branding and product line extensions. Marketings job is to take engineering products and use them to maximize revenue and profit. This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. Order Here.

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Up and Running

MAY 23, 2016

In fact, SaaS industry revenue is projected to grow from $49 billion in 2015 to $67 billion in 2018, a compound annual growth rate of approximately eight percent. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses. At this stage, simply list your primary revenue streams and your key expenses.

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

I was asked to explain why a marketing program that cost $150,000 bucks literally generated nothing in revenue for the company. Reply Customer Development Gut Checks « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on April 28, 2009 at 11:38 am Said: [.] Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice.

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Steve Blank

AUGUST 31, 2009

In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe more specifically how this model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. Was the sales revenue model based on actually testing the hypotheses outside the building? —– Part 2 of the Customer Development Manifesto to follow.

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usersknow.blogspot.com

APRIL 30, 2010

It’s not enough to just launch a feature and see if your revenue increases. You need to have some sort of plan for testing to see how it’s affecting key metrics , whether those are revenue, retention, registration, user happiness, or some other number you care about. How Am I Going to Get Feedback on this Feature?

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ReadWriteStart

AUGUST 1, 2011

Silicon Valley was born in an era of applied experimentation driven by scientists and engineers. This approach would shape Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ethos: In startups, failure was treated as experience (until you ran out of money). Until today. Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the $6.8-billion

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

What that meant was that until the test results came back the food can’t ship and that’s lost revenue for them. Entrepreneurship stretches from Main Street to Silicon Valley, from startups to big companies. Filed under: Customer Development , SiriusXM Radio Show. Want to be a guest on the show?

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