Steve Blank Quotes

When you start losing market share, it's really tough to gain it back; you need the product portfolio and presence in many markets.

The art of entrepreneurship and the science of Customer Development is not just getting out of the building and listening to prospective customers. It's understanding who to listen to and why.

I believe there is not any big difference between any consumer business, whether it's a bank or insurance or vodka or chocolate, whatever it is.

Things that we need to learn are the importance of establishing brand, establishing market presence. Technology-wise, it's things like ease of use, user interfaces; all of these things that tend to be less important in our other business segments are important things for us in the consumer market.

We aren't into the consumer space because that space is largely dominated by search and advertising, and it has a consumer face to it.

A lot of it had to do with when it's released and what's out in the marketplace, what's its competition.

Marketing is for companies who have sucky products.

What we need to do is run our business. We need to come up with a value prop that is so compelling that customers have to go for it.

If you haven't created the time as an owner to understand why people are choosing your model over your competition, then you are only managing the business that comes in the door, not actively seeking it out.

Advertising obviously helps with awareness, but if you look at some of the most successful companies, they're actually not generally ad-driven when it comes to customer adoption.

We have to focus on what we can do. It has to be about experience; it has to be about unique product. It has to be about delivering our content as broadly as we can, and that's been a huge effort on our part.

It's very challenging to carve back market share.

When a market isn't in transition, gaining market share is hard - you're fighting to take one or two points of share from competitors.

I know only a few ways to take market share and drive new revenue. I can engineer better products and services, I can build better relationships with my customers and deliver a higher level of service, or I can give my customers a lower price.

Market share is key.

Launching a successful product or startup has little to do with luck. Any business that gains traction on the market is the result of very careful strategizing and market analysis, not to mention the development of an original product or service.

Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics for one market type seldom work for another.

First and deadliest of all is a founder's unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them.

We learned that a product doesn't sell just because you're trying to do good in the world. You still have to have a healthy distribution, a good marketing strategy, and price the product properly.

Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product into the market, it's a marketing problem. You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds.

It's a very competitive market. AEG has a ticketing platform, Stubhub has grown their marketshare, Vivid has come out of nowhere. It's not like venues don't have options. If you're a venue you can pick any ticket platform you want, and we have to provide a better product and win that business fair and square.

Whether you're selling soft drinks, snack foods or a sport, all good marketers know it is important for every single person to want to buy their product.

Not every brand is for everybody.

We basically built a pricing model that surgically identified what people wanted to pay us for and what they didn't want to pay us for. One of the things we figured out early on was that we could create value for people by creating a product that allowed them to design something that they couldn't design without us.

We're not going into advertising. But we see the future battleground existing between ourselves, digital firms, and media-buying firms.