Steve Blank

When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars Ralph Waldo Emerson This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom says that the chickens have all come home to roost from a disastrous series of economic decisions including [...]

Filed under: Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto, Venture Capital | 79 Comments »

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Albert Einstein For decades startups were managed by pretending the company would follow a predictable path (revenue plan, scale, etc.) and being continually surprised when it didn’t. That’s the definition of insanity. Luckily most startups now realize there is a better [...]

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 11 Comments »

Over the last 50 years engineers have moved from building computers out of individual transistors to building with prepackaged logic gates. Then they adopted standard microprocessors (e.g. x86, ARM.) At the same time every computer company was writing its own operating system.  Soon standard operating systems (e.g. Windows, Linux) emerged. In the last decade open [...]

Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 51 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 | 15 Comments »

Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. They called back laughing and the invitation disappeared. At best I think business plan competitions [...]

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 46 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 | 24 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 | 46 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, Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development, Customer Development Manifesto | 63 Comments »

The Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship course at Stanford taught undergraduates how to take a technical idea and turn it into a profitable and scalable company. By getting out of the building on a team project, the class helped students viscerally understand that a startup is a search for a profitable business model. Students formed teams, [...]

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 3 Comments »

Back from a family humanitarian trip/vacation to one of the last bastions of Communism where “marketing” isn’t even a profession and entrepreneurship is a crime.  The irony is that the “Revolutionary Square” in all these Communist countries will be the the first place the McDonald’s go when the system collapses. ——————- In my last post I described my [...]

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 12 Comments »

One of the classes I teach in the engineering school at Stanford is E145: the Fundamentals of Technology Entrepreneurship, an introduction to building a scalable startup. While the class is open to everyone at the University, we want to teach science and engineering undergraduates how they can take a technical idea and turn it into [...]

Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 31 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 | 35 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 »

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 | 8 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 | 21 Comments »