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

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

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

I had last been in Chapel Hill on a winter’s day in 1986, traveling with the VP of Sales of our new supercomputer startup, Ardent. My ex-boss was going to be the VP of Engineering and I would report to the CEO whose marketing acumen and sales instincts seemed at the time to be telepathic and sense of theater was legend.

North Carolina 133

North Carolina Silicon Valley Fractional VPE Part-Time VPE 133

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. All we had to do was tell customers they could get video into their computer – and not promise anything else. Our answer was, “People will love this thing, as long as we don’t oversell the product.”

Video 190

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

The same issues arose time and again: big company management styles versus entrepreneurs wanting to shoot from the hip, founders versus professional managers, engineering versus marketing, marketing versus sales, missed schedule issues, sales missing the plan, running out of money, raising new money.

Silicon Valley 133

Silicon Valley RSS Venture Capital Customer Development 133

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

I vividly remember the sales guy saying, “It’s only some kid in field service. Some sales guy who was too busy to take the meeting was probably retired in Maui on the commissions. Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

We knew from back-of-the-envelope calculations that I would need 3 times the combined marketing and sales budgets of the incumbents for a head-on assault. (I The 3:1 Lanchester Laws said I would need $60M in marketing and sales spending to win. If we tried to match them on their playing field we’d never catch up.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 161

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

This post describes a solution – the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provide the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development.

Customer Development 255

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 255

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

Our small training department had been without a manager for months and finding a replacement didn’t seem to be high on the VP of Sales list. I walked into the VP of Sales’ office and with my knees trembling, I politely asked for the job. I’ve built my company using the Customer Development Model from Day One.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

JULY 13, 2009

Out of the Ashes A few of the key tenets of Customer Development , came from the ashes. The Customer Discovery lessons of “get outside the building and test your hypothesis with customers,&# and “the founders need to hear the results,&# came from this debacle. We all know how that ends up.

Silicon Valley 122

Silicon Valley Product RSS California 122

Steve Blank

MAY 1, 2009

The Customer Development talk can be seen here. That said I will be giving a Customer Development talk at TIECON , Saturday May 16th, 1:30 thanks for asking. steve Customer Development is Hard. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. It starts at ~40:30 in the video.

Customer Development 158

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 158

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.

Vertical 126

Vertical Silicon Valley RSS Marketing 126

ConversionXL

NOVEMBER 5, 2020

I put together a one-page website, a list of 100 people to reach out to, and a cold email script that would make seasoned sales professionals cringe. I know this language sounds formal and stuffy, but high-ticket service sales cycles are long. Choose to expand vertically or horizontally. Most B2B buyers know this.

PR 120

PR B2B Lean Audience 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2021

Lean Methodology consists of three tools designed for entrepreneurs building new ventures: The Business Model Canvas – to write down all the hypotheses about a new business; Customer Development – a process for testing those hypotheses outside the building; Agile Engineering – to rapidly build minimal viable products to test product/market fit.

Customer 427

Customer Marketing Lean Vertical 427

SVPG

AUGUST 30, 2013

The downward spiral continues because the sales organization loses a lot of deals when they try to compete with a weak product. And then you start complaining about working at a sales-driven company. This is not a new technique, but you may recognize it as the foundation of Customer Discovery and Customer Development.

Customer 65

Customer API Brazil Germany 65

Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

When I reviewed a recent product development book, it immediately shot up to Amazon sales rank 300. The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development ► June (3) What is a startup? Is that a lot? I have given more than two-dozen paid speeches this year – is that a lot? Is that good?

San Francisco 113

San Francisco Lean Technical Review Distribution 113

Steve Blank

APRIL 7, 2009

Do you know of any similar studies showing correlation between sales success and founder success? The three dropouts above were each, in their own way, some pretty slick sales guys. From the king of customer development, Steve Blank: [.] You just get successful. Sometimes they just drop out and do their own thing.

Silicon Valley 333

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 333

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. And without revenue how do we know if we achieved product/market fit to exit Customer Validation?” It’s an impressive portfolio.

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

Steve Blank

AUGUST 20, 2009

Resegmentation means these startups are trying to lure some of the current or potential customers away from incumbents by either offering a lower cost product, or by offering features that appealed to a specific niche or subset of the existing users. We only have 20 customers, and Large Company x has millions.” This is easy to test.

Silicon Valley 210

Silicon Valley Startup RSS Customer Development 210

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.

Customer Development 270

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 270

Steve Blank

APRIL 22, 2009

I took a deep breath and asked, “Ok, if you were, what percentage of your sales do you think these markets would be in 5 years?” “I guess less than 5%,” was the answer. Customer Development.) How big are your Mexican and Spanish markets,” I asked? Well, we’re not in those markets today… but we might be some day.”

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 208

Steve Blank

JUNE 1, 2009

How did your skills in sales and marketing and your ability to discover and validate customers run aground at Rocket Science?

Silicon Valley 140

Silicon Valley San Francisco RSS Vertical 140

David Teten

SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

I previously posted a detailed presentation with sales technology tools useful for B2B sales. is an AI bot which helps companies refine their sales pitch to VCs. Numerous VC funds rely on more general CRM and sales funnel solutions like Pipedrive and Streak. The VC Software Stack — the Untouched Vertical.

Private Equity 60

Private Equity Venture Capital Equity Technical Review 60

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?

Customer Development 245

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 245

Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2009

If it was a very big mistake, I blamed the VP of Sales. “This marketing campaign didn’t work? It was a brilliant strategy but Sales screwed it up.&# (My own lame defense here for this behavior is that sales and marketing are always cats and dogs in startups. Ownership and Teamwork not turf.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 120

Steve Blank

MARCH 22, 2009

Reply Customer Development and Start-up Models « Market By Numbers - Brant Cooper , on March 26, 2009 at 3:06 am Said: [.] But I wrote a post about an iterative, process-oriented approach to high-tech sales and marketing on 2.9.9. Posts are going to be a mix of topics: entrepreneurship, secret history and conservation.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley San Diego RSS California 120

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. Just remember ethics and values are about what you practice when the going gets tough. Do the right thing. It pays off in the end.

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley RSS Startup California 128

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2009

Some engineers were insulted that we were going to slow down their board and sales was convinced that within days of the board hitting the street we would have a black market in chips to speed up the $699 boards and turn them into $3,999 ones. This requires deep customer and competitive knowledge. No one believed it would work.

Silicon Valley 149

Silicon Valley Product RSS Engineer 149

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009

This post describes how following the traditional product development can lead to a “startup death spiral.&# In the next posts that follow, I’ll describe how this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model – offering a new way to approach startup sales and marketing activities.

Customer Development 233

Customer Development Developer Customer Silicon Valley 233

A Crowded Space

AUGUST 20, 2015

They will need to do tons of customer development. The sales and marketing channels will be complete guesses - trying lots of different things to see what works. Founders should have a clearer idea about which customer verticals work the best and focus exclusively on those. The product will be changing every week.

Vertical 60

Vertical Channel Acquisition Metrics 60

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

JUNE 15, 2009

His marketing and sales instincts and skills seemed magical and he built the company into a $400 million OEM supplier, ultimately selling the company to Unisys. Filed under: Customer Development , Family/Career , Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank , Entrepreneurs , Tips for Startups « Am I a Founder?

Entrepreneur 295

Entrepreneur Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS 295

Software By Rob

JULY 15, 2011

is a tool that helps you edge into customer development. It’s a free tool put together by Sean Ellis and Hiten Shah as a way for product owners to easily survey their customers using pre-written questions. But Analytics tells me that that only 37% of our sales come from search engine traffic. Photo by Eleaf.

Customer 55

Customer Analytics Vertical Sales 55

Steve Blank

APRIL 30, 2009

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales. He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject.

Sales 120

Sales Silicon Valley RSS Las Vegas 120

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

Steve Blank

MAY 15, 2009

This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed. Paul Henderson , on May 15, 2009 at 10:37 pm Said: A boot-strapping startup I once worked with was actually doing some real customer development and making real money from real customers for their early, ugly product. That’s when things went south.

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