I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example [...]
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Customer Development is a stupidly simple idea. It’s one that you can describe in 30-seconds or less. But it took me 3 years and almost 300 pages of 10-point type to describe the concept in my book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Unlike a traditional business book, The Four Steps is more akin to [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | 7 Comments »
One of the ways I learn is to teach. My students ask questions I can’t answer and challenge me to solve problems I never considered. 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 [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Teaching | 8 Comments »
One of the attributes of great entrepreneurs is that they are tenacious and relentless. This guest post is from Andrew Elliott of Lottay. Andrew read the Four Steps to the Epiphany, tracked me down at California Coastal Commission hearing in Santa Barbara, and had me meeting with him in a stairwell during a break in [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | 14 Comments »
Consumer Internet investing seems to have split off from traditional Venture Capital, and is creating a new category of VC’s: Lean VC’s. I think you can blame Customer and Agile Development for a small part of it. Here’s why. Electron-based Venture Capital When I first came to Silicon Valley the world of Venture Capital looked [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Venture Capital | 23 Comments »
One of the toughest problems for entrepreneurs is to keep score as they search for their business model. Keeping Score One of the key concepts of Customer Development is writing down your initial hypotheses (guesses) of all the parts of your business model, then updating them with the facts you find outside the building. Since [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | 8 Comments »
Startup CEO’s can’t delegate sales and expect it to happen. Customer Validation needs to have the CEO actively involved. Here’s an example in a direct sales channel. Customer Development Diagnostics over Lunch A VC asked me to have lunch with the CEO of a startup building cloud-based enterprise software. (Boy did I feel like Rip [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 14 Comments »
Taking Sides Are you are born with innate entrepreneurial talent or can you can be taught to operate like an entrepreneur? Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo.com, and Mark Suster of GRP Partners, have all weighed in on the nature side – you’re born being an entrepreneur or you’re not. [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Venture Capital | 14 Comments »
My summer has circled around serendipity and three presentations I’ve given. Full Circle from Yosemite Nine years ago I took my young daughters on a 7-day pack trip riding mules at 10,000 feet to the Yosemite High-Sierra camps. Granite mountains and alpine green meadows during the day, unblinking stars in the frigid August nights. At [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Venture Capital | 6 Comments »
It is a rare company that realizes it is time to fire the CEO when the financials are good but the business is fundamentally heading for a cliff. For me, I learned this lesson first hand. I had joined the board of a $200million public company that 15 years earlier had single-handily created an industry. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 23 Comments »
It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most responsive to change. Charles Darwin Companies have a fairly predictable life cycle. They start with an innovation, search for a repeatable business model, build the infrastructure for a company, then grow by efficiently executing the model. Over [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 9 Comments »
Consultants can help startups leverage their limited resources. But startups can shoot themselves in the foot when founders use consultants at the wrong time or in the wrong way. Here’s why. Your Process Doesn’t Work A friend of mine asked me to chat with a startup he’d invested in. “They’re deep into Customer Development,” he [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 24 Comments »
As an entrepreneur one of the most satisfying feelings was having an idea that few thought was rational, viable, or the common wisdom and building it into a profitable company. Though it’s over a decade since I’ve done a startup, I had that feeling again over the last few weeks. You Actually Did This? When [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 5 Comments »
I’ve been teaching Customer Development at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School since the fall of 2004 and in a joint MBA with Columbia since 2005. This Tuesday I finished the lectures for this semester and my students are now working hard on their final project. A lot has happened since I first authored and taught [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Teaching | 15 Comments »
Entrepreneurs see things before others do. They recognize patterns, form hypotheses and act long before all the data is in. Von Clausewitz described this as seeing through the “fog of war.” When their hypotheses are wrong we say they were hallucinating. When they are right we call them visionaries. (The best entrepreneurs pivot on each hallucination [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 18 Comments »
One of the best ways to get a debate going into the entrepreneurial world is to throw the “Nature versus Nurture” hand-grenade into a conversation. The question is whether you are born with innate entrepreneurial talent or whether you can be taught to operate like an entrepreneur. Taking Sides Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Venture Capital | 14 Comments »
This week I’m at the California Coastal Commission hearing in Ventura California wearing my other hat as a public official for the State of California. After the hearing I drove up to Santa Barbara to give a talk to a Lean Startup Meetup. The talk, “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups” summarized my current thinking about [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, California Coastal Commission, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 17 Comments »
Startups are the search to find order in chaos. Steve Blank At a board meeting last week I watched as the young startup CEO delivered bad news. “Our current plan isn’t working. We can’t scale the company. Each sale requires us to handhold the customer and takes way too long to close. But I think [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 36 Comments »
No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke I was catching up with an ex-graduate student at Café Borrone, my favorite coffee place in Menlo Park. This was the second of three “office hours” I was holding that morning for ex students. He and his co-founder were both [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 54 Comments »
“By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist.” Book of Five Rings I was having coffee with a former student who was complained that my idea of building a first product release with a minimum feature set was a bad idea. (One of the principles of Customer Development is to [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | 28 Comments »
Trading emails with a startup CEO building an iPhone app, I asked him why potential customers would buy his product. In response he sent me a competitive analysis. It looked like every competitive analysis I had done for 20 years, (ok maybe better.) And it made me sad. Looking at the spreadsheet, I realized that [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types | 29 Comments »
Customer Development is a technique startups use to quickly iterate and test each part of their business model. How you execute Customer Development varies, depending on your type of business. In my book, “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” I use enterprise software as the business model example. Ash Maurya, the CEO of WiredReach, has extended my work [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 27 Comments »
Startups that are searching for a business model need to keep score differently than large companies that are executing a known business model. Yet most entrepreneurs and their VC’s make startups use financial models and spreadsheets that actually hinder their success. Here’s why. Managing the Business When I ran my startups our venture investors scheduled [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 40 Comments »
It’s been a year since I’ve been blogging. The 100 or so posts add up to about 300 pages of text. One of the downsides to a large number of blog posts is that older stories tend to get buried and hidden. Categories and indexes on the web pages aren’t quite the right metaphor [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | 13 Comments »
In my last post I described what happened when a company prematurely scales sales and marketing before adequately testing its hypotheses in Customer Discovery. You would think that would be enough to get wrong, but entrepreneurs and investors compound this problem by assuming that all startups grow and scale by executing the Revenue Plan. They [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Market Types | 11 Comments »
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. In Discovery startups take all their hypotheses about the business model: product, market, customers, channel, etc. outside the building and test them [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Venture Capital | 39 Comments »
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood… Daniel Burnham A lot of entrepreneurs think that their startup is the next big thing when in reality they’re just building a small business. How can you tell if your startup has the potential to be the next Google, Intel or Facebook? A first [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Technology, Venture Capital | 17 Comments »
On first description, hearing the “get out of the building and talk to customers” precept of Customer Development leads people to say, “Oh, I get it. Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” It’s not. One of the times [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, MIPS Computers | 23 Comments »
The Lean Startup Circle is a Google discussion group (anyone can join) centered on Customer Development/Lean Startup strategy, tactics and implementation. They were kind enough to sponsor a meet-up in San Francisco. The Times Square Strategy discussion I had with Eric Ries, was still top of mind, so instead of my standard Customer Development lecture, [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 7 Comments »
One of the benefits of teaching is that it forces me to get smarter. 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. Dancing Around the Question Union Square Ventures was [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Market Types | 20 Comments »
I joined the board of Cafepress.com when it was a startup. It was amazing to see the two founders, Fred Durham and Maheesh Jain, build a $100 million company from coffee cups and T-shirts. But Cafepress’s most memorable moment was when the founders used a “Lessons Learned” VC pitch to raise their second round of [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | 13 Comments »
Never mistake motion for action. -Ernest Hemingway One of an entrepreneur’s greatest strengths is their relentless pursuit of a goal. But few realize how this differs from most of the population. Watching others try to solve problems reminded me why entrepreneurs are different. Progress Report Last week I happened to be sitting in my wife’s [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development, Family/Career | 38 Comments »
Getting “funded” is the holy grail for most entrepreneurs. Unfortunately in early stage startups the drive for financing hijacks the corporate DNA and becomes the raison d’etre of the company. Chasing funding versus chasing customers and a repeatable and scalable business model, is one reason startups fail. This post describes how companies using the Customer [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | 24 Comments »
At an entrepreneurs panel last week questions from the audience made me realize that the phrase “Lean Startup” was being confused with “Cheap Startup.” 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 [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 8 Comments »
At Ardent we assembled an amazing group of talented engineers to build personal supercomputers to sell to scientists and engineers. (Context here.) The company failed. Getting Out of the Building Wasn’t Entertainment – Discovery and Validation Now that I was the master of the “facts” about customer needs in these specialized vertical markets, and with my team [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development | 10 Comments »
At Ardent we were building personal supercomputers to sell to scientists and engineers. (Context here.) While the last post was titled “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When They Offer You a Job“, this post should probably be titled, “You Know You’re Getting Close to Your Customers When You Offer Them a Job.” I [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development | 12 Comments »
In 1985 Ardent Computer was determined to create a market niche for personal supercomputers. To understand our potential markets, we started by analyzing the marketing literature from Cray Research then crisscrossed the country talking to prospective customers – scientists and researchers in advanced corporate R&D centers and universities – to understand their needs. A week might [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development, Marketing, Vertical Markets | 6 Comments »
As VP of Marketing at our new startup, the CEO literally threw me out of the building and told me not to return until I understood the market and could identify the key applications and customers for Ardent’s new personal supercomputer. (See the previous Ardent posts for context.) Supercomputers With the introduction in 1976 of [...]
Filed under: Ardent, Customer Development | 10 Comments »
As a board member, investor and consumer, I’ve encountered companies firing their customers. While this sounds inexplicable to an outside observer, sometimes it makes sense. Other times it’s just plain dumb. Pattern Recognition One of the great things about being an entrepreneur is that you are constantly running a pattern recognition algorithm against a continual [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | Tagged: Entrepreneurs | 6 Comments »
The first four posts of the Customer Development Manifesto described the failures of the Product Development model. 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. Most [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 14 Comments »
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. Over the same 30 years, Venture Capital firms have honed their skills and strategies to match Wall Streets needs to achieve liquidity for their portfolio companies. You have to wonder: does [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Venture Capital | Tagged: Entrepreneurs | 16 Comments »
This series of posts of the “Customer Development Manifesto” describes how the failures of the Product Development model for sales and marketing led to the Customer Development Model. In future posts I’ll describe how Eric Ries and the Lean Startup concept provided the equivalent model for product development activities inside the building and neatly integrates customer and agile development. [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Market Types | Tagged: Customer Development | 10 Comments »
This post is part 3 of the “Customer Development Manifesto” series and makes more sense if you read part 1 and part 2. 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 [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 11 Comments »
This post makes more sense if you read part 1 of the Customer Development Manifesto. This post describes how the traditional product development model distorts startup sales, marketing and business development. In the next few posts that follow, I’ll describe how thinking of a solution to this model’s failures led to the Customer Development Model [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 6 Comments »
This post makes more sense if you read the previous post – The Leading Cause of Startup Death: The Product Development Diagram. 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 [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Customer Development | 25 Comments »
When I started working in Silicon Valley, every company bringing a new product to market used some form of the Product Development Model. Thirty years later we now realize that its one the causes of early startup failure. This series of posts is a brief explanation of how we’ve evolved from Product Development to Customer [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Tips for Startups | 21 Comments »
I’ve just met four great startups in the last three days. An Existing Market All four were trying to resegment an “Existing Market.” An existing market is one where competitors have a profitable business selling to customers who can name the market and can tell you about the features that matter to them. Resegmentation means [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | Tagged: Customer Development, Customer Discovery, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Tips for Startups | 9 Comments »
I’m a slow learner. It took me 8 startups and 21 years to get it right, (and one can argue success was due to the Internet bubble rather then any brilliance.) In 1978 when I joined my first company, information about how to start companies simply didn’t exist. No internet, no blogs, no books on startups, [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | Tagged: Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Tips for Startups | 9 Comments »
The most important early customers for your startup usually turn out to be quite different from who you think they’re going to be. He’s Only in Field Service When I was at Zilog, the Z8000 peripheral chips included the new “Serial Communications Controller” (SCC). As the (very junior) product marketing manager I got a call [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Zilog | Tagged: Customer Development, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 9 Comments »
At Zilog I was figuring out how to cope with job burnout. And one of my conclusions was that I needed to pick one job not two. I had to decide what I wanted to do with my career – go back to ESL, try to work for the Customer, or stay at Zilog? While [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, ESL, Family/Career, Zilog | Tagged: Cold War, ESL, Steve Blank | 9 Comments »
If you hang around technology companies long enough, you or someone you know may experience “burnout” – a state of emotional exhaustion, doubt and cynicism. Burnout can turn productive employees into emotional zombies and destroy careers. But it can also force you to hit the pause button and perhaps take a moment to reevaluate your [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, ESL, Family/Career, Zilog | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 13 Comments »
What Business Are We In? While the Rocket Science press juggernaut moved inexorably forward, a few troubling facts kept trying to bubble up into my consciousness. The company was founded to build games with embedded video to bring Hollywood stories, characters, and narratives to a market where “shoot and die” twitch games were in vogue. [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Rocket Science Games | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 7 Comments »
At Rocket Science while my partner Peter was managing the tools and game development, I was managing everything else. Which at this stage of the company was marketing and financing. Our “Hollywood meets Silicon Valley” story played great in Silicon Valley, they ate it up in Hollywood, and the business press tripped over themselves to [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, Rocket Science Games | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 10 Comments »
What do you mean you don’t want to hear about features? I was now a CEO of Rocket Science, and having a great time building the company (more about that in future posts.) Unfortunately, while I had gone through phases of video game addiction in my life, in no way could I be described as [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Rocket Science Games | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 7 Comments »
I did a fireside chat with a few entrepreneurs interested in Customer Development at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the venture firm behind such Skype, Baidu, Overture, …. Ravi Belani was nice enough to set it up, blog about the talk and film it. The relevant part starts about 4:30 into the video (wait for it to download.) [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 3 Comments »
Sometimes faith-based decisions can be based on too much faith. Entrepreneur-in-Residence After SuperMac I had been approached by one of our venture investors to be an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), a Silicon Valley phrase which says one thing but means another. To an entrepreneur, being asked to join a venture firm with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence title means [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Rocket Science Games | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 11 Comments »
Entrepreneurs tend to view adversity as opportunity. You’re Hired, You’re Fired. My first job in Silicon Valley: I was hired as a lab technician at ESL to support the training department. I packed up my life in Michigan and spent five days driving to California to start work. (Driving across the U.S. is an adventure [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, ESL, Technology | Tagged: Entrepreneurs, ESL, Steve Blank | 17 Comments »
When I was a young marketer I learned how to listen to customers by making a fool of myself. Twenty eight years ago I was the bright, young, eager product marketing manager called out to the field to support sales by explaining the technical details of Convergent Technologies products to potential customers. The OEM Business [...]
Filed under: Convergent Technologies, Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 10 Comments »
I was at the Stanford library going through the papers of Fred Terman and came across a memo from 1956 that probably hasn’t been seen or read in over 50 years. It had nothing to do with the subject I was looking for, so I read it, chuckled, put it back in the file and [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Fred Terman | 13 Comments »
Raising our kids and being an entrepreneur wasn’t easy. Being in a startup and having a successful relationship and family was very hard work. But entrepreneurs can be great spouses and parents. This post is not advice, nor is it recommendation of what you should do, it’s simply what my wife and I did to [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career, Technology | Tagged: Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 66 Comments »
Watching my oldest daughter graduate high school this week made me think about what it was like raising a family and being an entrepreneur. Convergent Technologies When I was in my 20’s I worked at Convergent Technologies, a company that was proud to be known as the “Marine Corps of Silicon Valley.” It was a [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career, Technology | Tagged: Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 42 Comments »
When my students ask me about whether they should be a founder or cofounder of a startup I ask them to take a walk around the block and ask themselves: Are you comfortable with: Chaos – startups are disorganized Uncertainty – startups never go per plan Are you: Resilient – at times you will fail [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 17 Comments »
This post makes sense when you read the previous three vertical markets posts first. 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. (As a reminder, the Customer Development process says your business plan is just [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology, Vertical Markets | 2 Comments »
I’ve screwed up a lot of startups on faith. One of the key tenets of entrepreneurship is that you start your company with insufficient resources and knowledge. Faith-based Entrepreneurship At first, entrepreneurship is a Faith-based initiative. There is no certainty about a startup on day-one. You make several first order approximations about your business model, [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank, Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Early Stage Startup, Tips for Startups | 12 Comments »
This post makes sense when you read the previous two vertical markets posts first. 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. In either type of startup you want to put in place processes in place [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology, Vertical Markets | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 7 Comments »
This post makes sense when you read the previous vertical markets post first. Customer/Market Risk Versus Invention Risk One day I was having lunch with a VC sharing what I learned from my students. “Steve,” he said, “you’re missing the most interesting part of vertical markets. Our firm has a portfolio of companies across a [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology, Vertical Markets | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 8 Comments »
In the past entrepreneurship was viewed (and taught) as a single process, with a single approach to creating a business plan and securing funding for a startup. The best entrepreneurship textbooks and blogs assume that advice to startups is generalizable. But as I learned from my students this “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work for all [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology, Vertical Markets | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 11 Comments »
I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like it Matters” memo as a board member after I saw our company at a trade show. Part 1 of this post offered some suggestions on going to trade shows to generate awareness. This post offers suggestions if you are going to a trade show to generate leads. [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 7 Comments »
Ignore This Post If you’re selling via the web and trade shows are something your grandfather told you about, ignore this post. If you’re in markets that still exhibit at them (semiconductors, communications, enterprise software, medical devices, etc.,) you know they’re expensive in time, dollars and resources. I wrote this “Going to Trade Shows Like [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 1 Comment »
Startup CEO Traits I was having lunch with a friend who is a retired venture capitalist and we drifted into a discussion of the startups she funded. We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Early Stage Startup, Tips for Startups | 33 Comments »
At some point in my career as I began to ponder how/why startups morph from agile, “can do” companies to ones that have lost their edge. I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building” debacle I had a hand in. Signs of Success One of the things you do right in a startup, [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Steve Blank, SuperMac, Tips for Startups | 22 Comments »
I was lucky to have been standing in the right place when video became part of the Macintosh. And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before – the Novelty Effect. Present at the Creation It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime, [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank, SuperMac | 15 Comments »
I ran into an interesting paper about thinking about analytics - A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis. It’s a useful read to explore and challenge analytical arguments and mind-sets. BTW, I don’t know to be hopeful or concerned that that this is the state of the art of analytical thinking at this [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Tips for Startups | 2 Comments »
The Sharp End of the Stick At some point in my career as I began to formulate thoughts about mission and intent, I started to think about the broader role of marketing in a growing technology company. It became clear to me that the mission of marketing in most companies has to be to support sales. While this [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | Tagged: Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 16 Comments »
Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame and the author of the Lessons Learned blog joined me at Startup2Startup for a joint Customer Development talk. Thanks to Dave McClure and Leonard Speiser for the opportunity to speak. The Customer Development talk can be seen here. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The slides are here. If you’ve [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types | Tagged: Customer Development, Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Startups, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 6 Comments »
I just finished reading Donovan Campbell’s eye-opening book, “Joker One“, about his harrowing combat tour in Iraq leading a Marine platoon. This book may be the Iraq war equivalent of “Dispatches” which defined Vietnam for my generation. (Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.) Campbell describes how he tried to instill in [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank, Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Early Stage Startup, Tips for Startups | 9 Comments »
At SuperMac, I thought I was good VP of marketing; aggressive, relentless and would take no prisoners – even with my peers inside the company. But a series of Zen-like moments helped me move to a different level that changed how I operated. It didn’t make my marketing skills any worse or better, but moved [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, SuperMac | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 7 Comments »
I was visiting a friend whose company teaches executives how to communicate effectively. He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.) As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, Technology | Tagged: Startups, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups | 12 Comments »
A year after we started repositioning the company, Engineering, which had been working on a family of new products literally for years, came to deliver some good news and bad news. First the bad news: the new family of eight high performance graphics cards we were counting on couldn’t be delivered. The plug-in co-processor architecture [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank | 9 Comments »
”If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti I was catching up over breakfast with a friend who’s now CEO of his own startup. One of the things he mentioned was that when it came to decision-making he still tended to think and act like an engineer. Each [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank | 17 Comments »
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there? At the same time we were educating the press, we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, SuperMac | 10 Comments »
I saw an article in the New York Times about Google’s hiring practices that reminded me of the differences between great big successful technology companies and small scrappy startups. I love Google. I think its one of the smartest companies out there. And it hires very smart people from the best schools. And if you meet their criteria [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 25 Comments »
A comment left on the previous post made me realize that it was time to discuss a subject I was going to save for latter – ethics. While the story about the Potereo benchmarks was about relentless execution, its glib description of designing the benchmarks could be read as we cheated. Given we consciously worked hard not [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Startups, Steve Blank | 6 Comments »
A few months into my tenure as the VP of Marketing, we now understood who our customers were. We had thought really hard about “market type” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Now we needed to put the tactical programs in place to make this repositioning strategy [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 8 Comments »
With insight into our customers, the first part of our strategy was to understand what kind of positioning problem we had. Was SuperMac attempting to introduce radically new products and create a new market? No, not really. Was the company attempting to be a low cost provider by introducing cheaper products to an existing market? [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 20 Comments »
I am going to post on Mondays and Thursdays – at least until I run out of war stories. Posts are going to be a mix of topics: entrepreneurship, secret history and conservation. I’ll try to mix the topics up during the week. BTW, keep the comments coming, they’re read and appreciated.
Filed under: Conservation, Customer Development, Secret History of Silicon Valley | Tagged: Steve Blank | 3 Comments »
After my first month we knew a lot, we knew more about our customers than anyone in the company. In this one month we had learned more about desktop publishing on the Mac than any one of our competitors. Now the question was what to do with it. First I need to make sure what [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 11 Comments »
A week before I started I got inkling of really how deep I was in. While I was waiting in the lobby to pick up my offer letter, the head of marketing communications (who was to be one of my direct reports) came up to me as I held my just signed employment agreement. She [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Steve Blank | 6 Comments »
After my eighth and likely final startup, E.piphany, sitting in a ski cabin, it became clear that there is a better a way to manage startups. Joseph Campbell’s insight of the repeatable patterns in mythology is equally applicable to building a successful startup. All startups (whether a new division inside a larger corporation or in [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, E.piphany, Venture Capital | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, Venture Capital | 12 Comments »
“Customer Development” was born four years earlier and 200 miles away on Sandhill Road. 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. I was consulting for the two venture capital firms who [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | Tagged: Steve Blank, Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Early Stage Startup | 1 Comment »
I realized that traditional ways to think about startups – have an idea, raise some money, do product development, go through an alpha test, beta test and first customer ship was the canonical model of how entrepreneurs thought about early stage ventures. This product development diagram had become part of the DNA of Silicon Valley. [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | Tagged: Steve Blank, Customer Development, Product Development Model, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Early Stage Startup | 4 Comments »
In 1999 I retired and began to reflect about my career and what had happened in the previous 21 years and eight startups in Silicon Valley. Alone in a ski cabin with the snow coming down outside, and my wife and daughters out on the slopes all day, I started collecting my thoughts by writing [...]
Filed under: Customer Development | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank | 2 Comments »
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