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, is you [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Steve Blank, SuperMac, Tips for Startups | 18 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, the first [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank, SuperMac | 13 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.
SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc. [...]
Filed under: Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank | 5 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 »
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 was [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Steve Blank | 8 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 heads [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, SuperMac | 10 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 to, [...]
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? While [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Market Types, Marketing, SuperMac | Tagged: Steve Blank | 20 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 leaving Ardent (a supercomputer company I’ll blog about later) in 1988, I consulted for Pixar when they were still in San Rafael and were a hardware company trying to make software and commercials. While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products [...]
Filed under: SuperMac | Tagged: Early Stage Startup, Steve Blank | Leave a Comment »
