When I was in my 20’s, I was taught the relationship between marketing and sales over a bonfire. — Over thirty years ago, before the arrival of the personal computer, there were desktop computers called office workstations. Designed around the first generation of microprocessors, these computers ran business applications like word processing, spreadsheets, and accounting. [...]
Filed under: Convergent Technologies, Marketing | 18 Comments »
First-Mover Advantage is an idea that just won’t die. I hear it from every class of students, and each time I try to put a stake through its heart. Here’s one more attempt in trying to explain why confusing testosterone with strategy is a bad idea. First mover advantage – great bad idea The phrase [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Marketing | 41 Comments »
I was catching up over coffee and a muffin with a student I hadn’t seen for years who’s now CEO of his own struggling startup. As I listened to him present the problems of matching lithium-ion battery packs to EV powertrains and direct drive motors, I realized that he had a built a product for [...]
Filed under: Marketing | 20 Comments »
Gathering real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Development as well as the Lean Startup. But what information to collect? Only 57 Questions Yesterday I got an email from an ex-student lamenting that only 2% of their selected early testers responded to their on-line survey. The survey said in part: The survey [...]
Filed under: Customer Development Manifesto, Marketing | 21 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 | 7 Comments »
Once I recovered from burnout at Zilog, I was working less and accomplishing more. I even had time to find a girlfriend who was a contractor to the company. One of her first comments was, “I didn’t know you even worked here. Where were you hiding?” If she only knew. What’s the Worst that Can [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Technology, Zilog | Tagged: Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 21 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 »
In 1994 Rocket Science Games was the only video game company with a rock in its lobby. We had moved our game development facilities from Berkeley and Palo Alto and consolidated into one building on Townsend Street in the “South of Market” neighborhood in San Francisco. (We’re were just around the corner from the future [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Rocket Science Games | Tagged: Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 4 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 »
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. 74HGZA3MZ6SV 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 | 18 Comments »
I love business plan competitions. I hate business plan competitions. I Love Business Plan Competitions I had a breakfast with a friend who has founded a few companies in Thailand and started the New Ventures Program at one of their universities. He was visiting Stanford and mentioned how proud he was that several of his Thai [...]
Filed under: Marketing, Technology, Venture Capital | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank, Tips for Startups, Venture Capital | 15 Comments »
While this story is about my experience in packaging for computer retail channels, if you substitute the word “web site” for retail, you’ll get the idea why these lessons were timeless for me. 74HGZA3MZ6SV SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, [...]
Filed under: Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: 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 | 13 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. 74HGZA3MZ6SV 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 [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank | 10 Comments »
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