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?

Customer Development 228

Customer Development Web Developer Customer 228

Steve Blank

JULY 7, 2009

I think customer feedback comes in a very unstructured manner, hence it is difficult to apply an algorithm on it. to make sense of the unstructured feedback received from customers. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. This is where it becomes an art as it requires skill (entrepreneurial?) Order Here.

Customer Development 129

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 129

Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 24, 2009

Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual collection of customer and market data. Let’s Fire Our Customers Part of the DNA of great entrepreneurs is a bias towards decisive and immediate action. Get it done, now.

Customer 218

Customer Silicon Valley RSS California 218

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2021

Department of Defense is coming to grips with the idea that the technologies it needs to keep the country safe and secure are no longer exclusively owned by the military or its prime contractors. The military is clamoring for cutting-edge technologies in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomy.

Artificial Inteligence 374

Artificial Inteligence Marketing Startup Silicon Valley 374

Steve Blank

MARCH 19, 2009

They sold to a set of customers I knew nothing about. After talking to its resellers and customers I realized that SuperMac was the only company that could be described as “fifth in a group of three.” They had an existing distribution channel and their dealers and customers thought they knew who the company was and what it stood for.

Silicon Valley 170

Silicon Valley Software Review Technical Review RSS 170

Steve Blank

MARCH 20, 2009

Our first question was, did the total number of customers that had already bought products from our competitors and us represent a saturated market or the tip of the iceberg? Since I was heading a marketing department, not acting as an individual contributor, I needed to teach all of marketing the importance of customer data.

Silicon Valley 150

Silicon Valley Customer RSS Philippines 150

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. He continued: “I’d like to convince my boss so our company can be your first customer.”

Silicon Valley 261

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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 310

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Steve Blank

APRIL 6, 2009

Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. By 1961 its customers now included our intelligence agencies.

Silicon Valley 201

Silicon Valley Stealth RSS California 201

Steve Blank

JUNE 11, 2009

Passionate – is the company/product/customers the most important thing in your life? However, you will be dealing with almost daily change, (new customer feedback/insights from a Customer Development process and technical roadblocks ,) as the company searches for a repeatable and scalable business model. Get customers first.

Cofounder 230

Cofounder Founder Silicon Valley Technical Cofounder 230

Steve Blank

AUGUST 13, 2009

Customer Development/Lean Startups In hindsight startups and the venture capital community left out the most important first step any startup ought to be doing – hypothesis testing in front of customers- from day one. It’s what my textbook on Customer Development describes. and “What did customers think of your prototype?”

Silicon Valley 208

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review Lean 208

Steve Blank

OCTOBER 5, 2009

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times Ardent would be my third technology company as a VP of Marketing (Convergent Technologies and MIPS Computers were the other two.) It was my ex boss from Convergent Technologies, “Steve we’ve all just resigned from Convergent and we’re starting a new company.

North Carolina 133

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Steve Blank

SEPTEMBER 14, 2009

Posted on September 14, 2009 by steveblank Over the last 30 years Wall Street’s appetite for technology stocks have changed radically – swinging between unbridled enthusiasm to believing they’re all toxic. In this time, building a successful business meant building a company that had paying customers quarter after quarter.

Silicon Valley 237

Silicon Valley IPO Technical Review Venture Capital 237

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 26, 2009

So no post today on entrepreneurship, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Customer Development, Lean Startups, etc. After more customer interviews, we have shifted our market type hypothesis to- entering an existant market. Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. Order Here. Now In Print!

Silicon Valley 156

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Steve Blank

APRIL 23, 2018

Sloan realized that GM couldn’t compete on price, so GM created multiple brands of cars, each with its own identity targeted at a specific economic bracket of American customers. The idea was to keep customers coming back to General Motors over time to upgrade to a better brand as they became wealthier. is closing rapidly.

Michigan 301

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Austin Startup

MARCH 3, 2020

Their algorithms control the placement of 3D content into custom environments, which can be created in massive parallel variations. See the pitch at SXSW in the category of Enterprise & Smart Data Technology , 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm Saturday, March 14, before a live audience and a panel of expert judges.

Technical Review 63

Technical Review Los Angeles Cofounder Silicon Valley 63

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 6, 2014

The functions of an early-stage board are pretty obvious and well understood: Providing introductions to customers, biz dev partners, recruits, the press, other investors, etc. Over time you start to figure out who you customers are and how to sell to them or how to get them to adopt your products if you’re a consumer-oriented startup.

Technical Review 325

Technical Review Early Stage Software Review Los Angeles 325

Steve Blank

FEBRUARY 23, 2009

Steve Blanks 30 years of Silicon Valley startup advice. I was between my 7th and 8th and final startup; licking my wounds from Rocket Science, the company I had cratered as my first and last attempt as a startup CEO. Yet when I talked to my venture capital friends, they said, “Well, that’s just how startups work. Order Here.

Silicon Valley 133

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The Equity Kicker

MAY 9, 2016

The bit I liked the most described the role of Stanford in getting Silicon Valley going in the late 1950s. Silicon Valley started in the small district of Palo Alto and the emergence of Tech City here in East London has been similarly important. We focus on ecommerce and marketplaces.

Silicon Valley 60

Silicon Valley Venture Capital eCommerce Startup 60

Steve Blank

MAY 11, 2009

And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. People who aren’t current customers of our graphics boards will get to know our company and brand. All we had to do was tell customers they could get video into their computer – and not promise anything else.

Video 190

Video Silicon Valley RSS California 190

Steve Blank

JULY 9, 2009

So I got out out of the building to meet and understand our customers and distribution partners. I remember after a month or two of talking to 14-22 year old male gamers (our potential target market,) I realized that for the first time in my career I had no emotional connection to my customers or channel partners.

Silicon Valley 159

Silicon Valley RSS California Video 159

Steve Blank

JULY 30, 2009

Your Customers are Not Who You Think For years I thought this “million unit chip sale by accident&# was a “one-off&# funny story. That is until I saw that in startup after startup customers come from places you don’t plan on. Your board nods sagely at your target customer list.

Silicon Valley 146

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 146

Steve Blank

APRIL 2, 2009

We had thought really hard about “ market type ” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort. I just want to do strategy.”

Silicon Valley 128

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS Software Review 128

Steve Blank

MARCH 25, 2009

While we sometimes cut the price of graphics boards, it was only because we offered our customers no compelling reasons to buy one that was priced equivalently to the market share leaders. We had been attempting to compete by their rules with the same types of technology messages. And we lost money when we did so.

Silicon Valley 161

Silicon Valley Marketing RSS California 161

Steve Blank

AUGUST 3, 2009

If you read only one previous post, read this one (or this one.) ————- The Birth of Entrepreneurship in The Hot Cold War Silicon Valley entrepreneurship was born in the middle of a secret war with the Soviet Union. military, the CIA and the National Security Agency.

Silicon Valley 179

Silicon Valley RSS Europe Germany 179

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 272

Silicon Valley Technical Review RSS PR 272

Steve Blank

JUNE 3, 2009

Reducing Risk – Simulation versus Customer Development If you remember the first part of this discussion, startups face two types of risk; invention risk and/or customer/market risk. The Customer Development Process I teach and write about is designed to do just that.

Vertical 140

Vertical Silicon Valley Marketing RSS 140

ReadWriteStart

NOVEMBER 3, 2011

Today James Hickey from San Diego, California, pitched Parallel6 , a company that does social media marketing services for brands and also has a white label mobile app that can be customized and branded for their clients' mobile and social marketing needs. In that case, the verticals of choice could be manufacturing, wholesale and retail.

North Carolina 116

North Carolina San Diego Entrepreneur Balance Sheet 116

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

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. One of the groups I spoke to was the Australian Sports Technology Network. With 317 million people the U.S. has a large enough market that most U.S.

Global 335

Global Australia Silicon Valley China 335

Steve Blank

JULY 27, 2009

After a year and a half of running training and teaching the new Z-8000 and its peripheral chips, I began to figure out that one of the jobs of marketing was to translate what engineering built into a description that our salesmen could use to talk to potential customers. I also knew our customers.

Silicon Valley 120

Silicon Valley RSS Technical Review California 120

Steve Blank

NOVEMBER 23, 2009

The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries , was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture , I offered my thoughts on: the origin of Customer Development, where we are today, and where does Customer Development go, and how you can help get it there.

Customer Development 229

Customer Development Developer Silicon Valley Customer 229

Steve Blank

MAY 22, 2009

While one could argue that a trade show is just another demand creation activity akin to advertising or PR, trade shows are the closest eyeball-to-eyeball contact you’re company is going to have with customers, competitors and partners. Strong pre-show promotion will let your customers and prospects know about your exhibit.

Silicon Valley 139

Silicon Valley RSS California Customer Development 139

ReadWriteStart

JUNE 23, 2011

Acelerar Technologies Daniel expects SharePoint's cloud based solution provider eco-system to develop over the next few years. Anupam Rajey from Lucknow, India, presented Acelerar Technologies , an outsourced accounting services BPO project from India. For now, it won't come in through the store. Discuss.

Spain 115

Spain Entrepreneur India San Francisco 115

The Startup Magazine

JUNE 1, 2023

By Daniel Sokolovksy, Co-Founder and CEO, WARP and Troy Lester, Co-Founder and CRO, WARP The dissolution of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was more than just a bank collapse, it was a reality check for both startups and the VCs that fund them. That includes us. As an early-stage company that just closed our seed round at $8.1

Early Stage 108

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ReadWriteStart

OCTOBER 27, 2011

It is also an excellent platform to address the questions from prospects and help clarify issues and objections for any sales process, which is one of the primary ways Voluble is seeing some of its major early customers using it. She is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant. I thought that was brilliant.

Entrepreneur 116

Entrepreneur San Francisco Technical Review New Jersey 116

Steve Blank

APRIL 20, 2009

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be. How did Silicon Valley start?

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