Steve Blank

AUGUST 23, 2010

At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the California Coast. We’re Not Here for a Sales Call. But we are not here for a sales call.&#.

Customer Development 239

Customer Development Developer Customer South America 239

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

While he correctly understood how to frame his hypotheses with a business model canvas, and he was doing a good job in customer development – the third component of Lean is using Agile Development to rapidly and iteratively build incrementally better versions of the product – in the form of minimal viable products (MVP’s).

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

ConversionXL

SEPTEMBER 6, 2013

This is a customer development problem. By the end of this article, you should have a better understanding of how to develop new products or tweak your existing offerings by working with existing or prospective customers to incorporate their feedback to create viable solutions to their problems, and clearly communicate their value.

Customer Development 126

Customer Development Conversion Developer Customer 126

Steve Blank

APRIL 12, 2010

Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. A few investors suggested he add new product features, others suggested firing the VP of Sales. The Customer Development model that I write and teach about is the entrepreneur’s version of Boyds’ OODA loop.).

Business Model 335

Business Model Agile Customer Development Startup 335

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. VP of Sales – “Sure.”

Burn Rate 252

Burn Rate Silicon Valley Marketing Boston 252

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

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

We think teaching teams a formal methodology around the Lean Framework (Business Model design, Customer Development and Agile Engineering) is a natural evolution of how successful incubators/accelerators will build startups. Filed under: Customer Development , Lean LaunchPad , Teaching. Technology in search of a market.

Lean 322

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 322

Steve Blank

MARCH 4, 2010

One of the principles of Customer Development is to get out of the building and understand the smallest feature-set customers will pay for in the first release.). I can’t get more than one of ten potential customers to think that this is something they’d buy.” Why A Minimum Feature Set? Steve, you’re wrong.

Customer Development 313

Customer Development Business Model Developer Search 313

Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

understand the core customers and the sales and marketing process required for initial clinical sales and downstream commercialization. gather data essential to customer partnerships/collaboration/purchases before doing the science. Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Life Sciences National Science Foundation'

Lean 277

Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 277

Steve Blank

APRIL 5, 2017

My engineers say our website is old school, and we need to be on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, my VP of Sales says we’re wasting our marketing dollars not targeting the right people and my board keeps giving me their opinions of how we should describe our product and company. How do I sort out what to do?”. with a strategy.

Marketing 318

Marketing Audience Technical Review PR 318

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

In both cases, the answer was that the founder would go to find other ideas, turn those into paper descriptions and validate it with customers. Customer Validation 101. The Fallacy of Customer Development Hubris Versus Humility: The $15 billion Difference Less is More, More or Less Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2012

Filed under: Air Force , Customer Development , Family/Career/Culture. Unless you’ve had a ton of experience (which includes failing) in a broad range of areas you’re only guessing. Great careers start by peeling potatoes.

Thailand 334

Thailand Engineer Customer Development SEO 334

Steve Blank

AUGUST 17, 2012

We had closed four $100,000 deals for our customer relationship management software. Joe Dinucci, our VP of Sales, was hot on the trail of our next big order. After seeing the demo, the CFO walked Joe over to the office of Autodesk’s VP of sales, and said to her, “I think this product might solve your sales reporting problem.”.

Forecast 299

Forecast Sales Matching Customer Development 299

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010

It’s a paradox, but early sales success in a startup can kill its chances of becoming a large successful company. The cause is often sales and marketing execs who’ve become too comfortable with an initial sales model and panic at the first sign of a Pivot. And this time sales revolted. He was paid 1% of gross sales.

Silicon Valley 244

Silicon Valley Technical Review Spain Engineer 244

Steve Blank

MARCH 2, 2011

Working with him, I’ve been impressed to watch his small team embrace Customer Development (and Business Model Generation ) and search the world for the right product/market fit. They’ve tested their hypotheses with literally hundreds of customer interviews on every continent in the world. Corporate elephants can dance.

Silicon Valley 239

Silicon Valley Agile Customer Development Early Stage 239

Steve Blank

APRIL 9, 2009

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers , talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to: Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Silicon Valley 271

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 271

Startup Professionals Musings

APRIL 28, 2014

Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Chief Brand Officer.

CTO Hire 252

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Angel Investor Public Relations 252

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. We’ve pivoted our Lean LaunchPad / I-Corps curriculum.

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

Startup Professionals Musings

FEBRUARY 22, 2013

Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Chief Brand Officer.

CTO Hire 244

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 244

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 7, 2011

The number of serial entrepreneurs is very low and until recently most of the talented sales and marketing professionals choose to work for Nokia. Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan , Customer Development , Teaching , Technology , Venture Capital.

Finland 329

Finland Venture Capital Government Russia 329

Steve Blank

JULY 24, 2012

The VC’s suggested I should spend a day at Onyx Software, an early pioneer in Sales Automation in Seattle. Their VP of Sales was about 6’ 3” and seemed to be almost as wide. But in that one day I had learned a lot about sales automation that would shape my thinking when we founded Epiphany. I Know A Great Customer.

Seattle 265

Seattle Cofounder Engineer Sales 265

Startup Professionals Musings

DECEMBER 1, 2010

Chief Sales Officer (VP Sales). What you really need is a VP of Marketing and Customer Development, who can help with lead generation and honing the message, rather than an executive to manage a sales team and existing customers. Chief Brand Officer.

CTO Hire 227

CTO Hire Fractional CTO Startup Angel Investor 227

YoungUpstarts

SEPTEMBER 4, 2014

In today’s hypercompetitive, customer-driven business world, you need to look at new ways to make your business stand out. By exploring customer service initiatives, new sales channels, and private label financing, to name a few, you can attract and keep new customers. Improve the Customer Experience.

Customer 168

Customer PPC Software Review Finance 168

SoCal CTO

JANUARY 5, 2011

- SoCal CTO , January 13, 2010 5 Lessons from 150 startup pitches - A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks , July 11, 2010 9 Reasons Why Many Smart People Go Nowhere - Life Beyond Code , March 29, 2010 No Accounting For Startups - Steve Blank , February 22, 2010 Startup Advice In Exactly Three Words - #StartupTriplets - OnStartups , January (..)

Silicon Valley 378

Silicon Valley Startup Term Sheet Venture Capital 378

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 12, 2009

The presentation didn’t have a single word about Lean Startups or Customer Development. Reply Dan Hodgins , on November 13, 2009 at 1:12 am Said: Hi Steve, Just listened to your “Retooling Early Stage Development&# for about the 10th time tonight as I was cleaning my room. Your results may vary.

Venture Capital 245

Venture Capital Silicon Valley RSS Hockey Stick 245

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 7, 2009

Customer Development We were starting Epiphany, my last company. I was out and about in Silicon Valley doing what I would now call Customer Discovery trying to understand how marketing departments in large corporations worked. See part one for the first time it happened. This time it was serious. Good stuff too.

Silicon Valley 261

Silicon Valley Non-disclosure Agreement NDA Startup 261

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

We spent time out in the marketplace talking with customers, looking at their solutions, comparing ourselves with our competition and then squirreling ourselves away in our offices designing our next set of features. Our sales guys were on the front line and heard what they needed to win deals. Tim started to change our processes.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

MAY 29, 2011

more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups. Filed under: Customer Development , Teaching , Venture Capital. Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot. Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x

Technical Cofounder 335

Technical Cofounder Early Stage Startup Silicon Valley 335

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 25, 2010

It’s the combination of Business Model Design and Customer Development. Business Model Design Gets Dynamic, Customer Development Gets Strategic. One of the key tenets of Customer Development is that your business model is nothing more than a set of untested hypotheses. Business Model Design.

Customer Development 332

Customer Development Business Model Developer Customer 332

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

I wanted to understand how customers bought our products. I knew we were selling through a multi-level indirect sales channel. That’s a mouthful to say that our sales people didn’t sell our products directly to a customer. Market messages to indirect sales channels are just like that.

Silicon Valley 213

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 213

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 19, 2009

In short order they learned how to transition from being customers on the receiving end of a sales pitch to giving one. They knew the technology trendsetters in their fields and got us in front of them. To a person they became passionate evangelists and effective marketers.

Engineer 224

Engineer Silicon Valley Part-Time VPE Advisory Board 224

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

NOVEMBER 5, 2014

It’s often said that you shouldn’t talk about price during customer development interviews. 1/mo means you can’t afford customer service and it must incrementally free to run the technology behind it, both of which have implications for the sort of product you have to build (e.g.

Bootstrapping 294

Bootstrapping Technical Review B2C Sales Cycle 294

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

Do you really want to spent $100k building a product to discover through Customer Development that the market is too small? Let’s start with how much value you think you’ll create for your customer if they use your product in terms of hours saved, costs avoided, extra sales, better conversion rates or whatever.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

JULY 20, 2009

Since the training department was part of sales no one really paid attention to the four of us. It was a Friday (about ¾’s through my work week) and I was in a sales department meeting. The VP of Sales gave me a funny look and just moved on with the agenda. VP of Sales? Repeat every day, six or seven days a week.

Silicon Valley 206

Silicon Valley Chad RSS San Francisco 206

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

billion for a company with less than $50 million in sales. The IPO Bubble – August 1995 – March 2000 In August 1995 Netscape went public, and the world of start ups turned upside down. On its first day of trading, Netscape stock closed at $58/share, valuing the company at $2.7

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

A Smart Bear: Startups and Marketing for Geeks

FEBRUARY 14, 2012

product that barely worked, no sales organization (except tech support, which often works better anyway ), and I just hoped they’d run a credit card. make for not putting customer development before writing code. I had a $39.95 You have a more fundamental issue which, if remedied, will lead to the answers you seek.

Customer 231

Customer Software Review IP Technical Review 231

Steve Blank

JUNE 29, 2009

Filed under: Customer Development , ESL , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , ESL « Convergent Technologies: War Story 1 – Selling with Sports Scores A Wilderness of Mirrors » 17 Responses Michael F. It’s been a very, very difficult journey.

Agile 269

Agile Silicon Valley RSS California 269