Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2018

Reading the NY Times article “ Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture, ” I realized it was time for a new startup heuristic: the amount of customer discovery and product-market fit you need to find is inversely proportional to the amount and availability of risk capital. It’s the antithesis of the Lean Startup.

Lean 335

Lean Burn Rate Startup IPO 335

Steve Blank

JUNE 19, 2014

Today the National Institutes of Health announced they are offering my Lean LaunchPad class ( I-Corps @ NIH ) to commercialize Life Science. 110 researchers and clinicians, and Principal Investigators got out of the lab and hospital, and talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them.

Lean 277

Lean SBIR Intellectual Property Customer Development 277

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 4, 2013

We’re deep into teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. The class has talked to 1,440 customers to date.). Therapeutics customer = pharma and biotech companies. Therapeutics (Starting at 0:30).

Lean 266

Lean Customer Business Model Customer Development 266

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 30, 2012

The Lean LaunchPad Class. You may have read my previous posts about the Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship class. The class teaches founders how to dramatically reduce their failure rate through the combination of business model design, customer development and agile development using the Startup Owners Manual.

Startup 335

Startup Lean Incubator Business Model 335

SoCal CTO

OCTOBER 6, 2011

I’m going to take that thought out into the field and validate it with my customers." I’ve spoken to dozens of customers, I have a validated customer persona, built an MVP to test key behavioral hypotheses, and the data doesn’t back what you’re saying." Customer Validation 101. Either: "That’s interesting.

Customer 227

Customer Fractional CTO Viral Lean 227

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 10, 2014

The University of Maryland is now integrating the Lean LaunchPad ® into standard innovation and entrepreneurship courses across all 12 colleges within the University. Over 44 classes have embedded the business model canvas and/or Customer Discovery including a year-long course taken by every single one of its bioengineering majors.

Maryland 280

Maryland Lean DC Virginia 280

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 21, 2013

Eric Ries was kind enough to invite me to speak at his Lean Startup Conference. In the talk I reviewed the basic components of the Lean Startup and described how we teach it. 3:36 The 3 Components of the Lean Startup. 6:00 Teaching startups & companies Lean: The Lean LaunchPad class. Additional videos here.

Video 288

Video Oakland Lean Venture Capital 288

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 5, 2013

Over the last three years our Lean LaunchPad / NSF Innovation Corps classes have been teaching hundreds of entrepreneurial teams a year how to build their startups by getting out of the building and testing their hypotheses behind their business model. The next customer segment we tried was startup founders. Here’s how that happened.

Lean 322

Lean Customer Development Sales Cycle Business Model 322

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 3, 2014

I was driving home from the BIO conference in San Diego last month and had lots of time for a phone call with Dave, an ex student and now a founder who wanted to update me on his Customer Discovery progress. Customer Discovery. He worked hard to deeply understand the customer problems of these two customer segments.

Cofounder 336

Cofounder Founder Technical Cofounder Coder 336

Steve Blank

AUGUST 21, 2013

We’re going to test this hypothesis by teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. used to serve those customers. Another team reordered their device’s feature set based on customer needs.

SBIR 321

SBIR Technical Review Lean Startup 321

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me a view of the management issues my customers were dealing with. To fill this gap I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany , a book about the Customer Development process and how it changes the way startups are built.

Technical Review 331

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 331

Steve Blank

MARCH 8, 2011

In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the " target="_blank">Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots. to get hard-earned information.

Lean 307

Lean Business Model Customer Development Guinea 307

VC Cafe

JULY 26, 2020

.” Steve Blank, “Is the lean startup dead?” ” The Lean Startup movement started out of necessity. Most principles of Lean Startup remain true, as described by Steve Blank in The Lean Startup Changes Everything : Business Plans are dead: Startups a series of hypothesis that need to be tested.

Lean 214

Lean Seed Capital Startup Burn Rate 214

Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 16, 2013

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference. As Lean Startup methods have been used now for a number of years, we’ve become increasingly interested in how companies use them to sustain growth. Next Tuesday, October 22 at 10a PT, we’ll take a look at this advanced entrepreneurship question.

Lean 167

Lean Startup Software Engineering Agile 167

Steve Blank

JANUARY 22, 2014

Over the years Dino and I brainstormed about how Lean entrepreneurship would affect regional development. Success depends on finding startups that have identified acute customer pains in large markets where conditions are ripe for a new entrant. Customer Development Lean LaunchPad Science and Industrial Policy Venture Capital'

Early Stage 295

Early Stage Silicon Valley Oregon Technical Review 295

Steve Blank

JUNE 26, 2014

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

Intellectual Property 290

Intellectual Property Lean IP Open Source 290

Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 1, 2014

Guest post by Lisa Regan, writer for The Lean Startup Conference The Lean Startup Conference is next week--and now that we can step back and see all the speakers and mentors, we have to say: Wow. And the whole site was developed in just 9 weeks.

Lean 165

Lean Fractional CTO Part-Time VPE Fractional VPE 165

YoungUpstarts

APRIL 21, 2013

Enter “ The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses “, a New York Times bestseller by founder of IMVU (creator of 3D avatars) Eric Ries. Not doing so would end up in wasteful innovations and features that customers do not want.

Lean 193

Lean Technical Review North America Startup 193

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 1, 2009

As organizations we have become more open and I believe this is great for businesses and their customers. 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.

Customer 280

Customer Technical Review Software Review Mexico 280

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 16, 2014

I was having breakfast with Radhika, an ex-grad student of mine who wanted to share her Customer Discovery progress for her consumer hardware startup. Activities define the unique expertise your company needs to deliver the value proposition, customers, channels, customer relationships and/or revenue. (If Customer Development'

Cofounder 335

Cofounder Founder Intellectual Property Business Model 335

Steve Blank

JANUARY 2, 2014

This post is part of our series on the National Science Foundation I-Corps Lean LaunchPad class in Life Science and Health Care at UCSF. Doctors, researchers and Principal Investigators in this class got out of the lab and hospital talked to 2,355 customers, tested 947 hypotheses and invalidated 423 of them. Then reality hit.

Lean 250

Lean Algorithm Customer Development IP 250

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. We’ve been reading your blog about your Lean Launchpad class.” We want to make a bet that your Lean Launchpad class can apply the scientific method to market-opportunity identification.

Incubator 310

Incubator Government Silicon Valley Lean 310

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 6, 2014

The concepts in my Lean LaunchPad curriculum can be taught in a variety of classes–as an introduction to entrepreneurship all the way to a graduate level “ capstone class.”. Our Lean LaunchPad class requires student teams to get out of the building and talk to 10-15 customers a week while they’re building the product.

Lean 286

Lean Customer Development Business Model Email 286

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. I want to tell you a story about how a team pivoted and succeeded by synchronizing product and customer development. Here’s a guest post from Frank.

San Jose 261

San Jose Technical Review Customer Development Software Review 261

Steve Blank

APRIL 4, 2011

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This week they were testing who the customer, user, payer for the product will be (and discovering if they have a multi-sided business model , one with both buyers and sellers.) The news from customers was not good.

Customer 241

Customer Business Model Nebraska Cloud 241

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 13, 2010

But to give you a sense of how fast they are moving, it’s only been a week since I posted the syllabus for our new Stanford entrepreneurship class Engr245 ( The Lean Launchpad.) Here’s the course announcement from Professor Vergara (in English): Customer Development Course in Chile – Lean Launchpad.

Chile 241

Chile Silicon Valley Lean Agile 241

Steve Blank

APRIL 16, 2013

It was not only my secret weapon in thinking about new startup strategies, it also gave me a view of the management issues my customers were dealing with. To fill this gap I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany , a book about the Customer Development process and how it changes the way startups are built.

Technical Review 223

Technical Review Lean Venture Capital Customer Development 223

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.” Or worse, that every potential customer should want it.

Customer Development 313

Customer Development Business Model Developer Search 313

Steve Blank

DECEMBER 9, 2013

As our Lean LaunchPad for Life Sciences class winds down, a good number of the 26 teams are trying to figure out whether they should go forward to turn their class project into a business. I pointed out that the “data” you gather in 10 weeks (talking to 100+ customers, partners, payers, etc.,) My customers were 14-year old boys.

Cofounder 330

Cofounder Technical Cofounder Liquidity Event Lean 330

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 9, 2009

Oh, and we had no installed customer base. Entrepreneurs are Relentless Jim’s goal was to get other companies to put their software on an unfinished, buggy computer with no customers. So much so, I took a Customer Development approach to my startup, which I wrote up as a Case Study for the Google Group Lean Startup Circle.

Silicon Valley 332

Silicon Valley RSS Software Review Technical Review 332

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. We’re helping them convert one of the critical product lines inside an existing division from a traditional waterfall project management process into Lean. All good Lean basics.

Agile 65

Agile Lean Leadership Conversion 65

Steve Blank

JUNE 8, 2021

This class is built on conducting in-person of interviews with customers/ beneficiaries and stakeholders, but due to the pandemic, teams now had to do all their customer discovery via a computer screen. How would customer interviews work via video? See here for an extended discussion of remote customer discovery.).

Lean 417

Lean Security Asia SBIR 417

Steve Blank

JANUARY 30, 2013

With hindsight we should have had “proof of concepts” tested in a corporate center (think ‘pop-up incubator’) where they would do extensive Customer Discovery. Doing so meant they would have to take risks for IP acquisition and customer/market risks outside their experience or comfort zone.

Programming 273

Programming Technical Review Incubator Intellectual Property 273

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

Both Sides of the Table

NOVEMBER 3, 2009

The last couple of years has also seen the huge initial success of Ycombinator, the Lean Startup and many other product driven approaches to going to market. It should talk about how many customers you think you will acquire and how much you’ll charge for your product. It’s “lifetime value&# of a customer.

Business Plan 334

Business Plan AJAX Venture Capital Technical Review 334

Steve Blank

APRIL 10, 2009

Since every situation is unique, there is no perfect solution to any engineering, customer or competitor problem, and you shouldn’t agonize over trying to find one. An example of a reversible decision could be adding a product feature, a new algorithm in the code, targeting a specific set of customers, etc.

Silicon Valley 309

Silicon Valley RSS Startup Agile 309

Steve Blank

JANUARY 28, 2013

In hindsight we were having our employees get out of the building to talk to customers, build prototypes and generate partner interest – essentially doing Customer Discovery years before Steve Blank taught his Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford and the National Science Foundation!). What went right? We had C-level support.

Programming 301

Programming Design Lean Seed Money 301