Steve Blank Quotes

Knowing your customer inside and out is mission-critical, and it takes time. It's impossible to hit on the insights that will ultimately decide your company's fate without putting them to the test - literally - even if that takes longer than you'd have liked.

If you go into business school and suggest firing a customer, they'll kick you out of the building. But it's so true in my experience. It allows you to identify the customers you really want to work with.

Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets

Choose your customers, choose your future.

Corporations invest in sophisticated CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, programs to effectively oversee their relationship with their customers at every point during the buying process.

Many consumer Internet business executives are loyalists of the Lifetime Value model, often referred to as the LTV model or formula. Lifetime value is the net present value of the profit stream of a customer.

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.

When you understand your customer base, you have to provide them with what they want.

Once you create a loyal customer base, it's tough for a competitor to take that away.

Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.

You have to understand who your customer is and her motivations and marry it to what's happening in the outside world.

The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.

The goal of listening to customers is not to please every one of them. It's to figure out which customer segments serve your needs - both short and long term.

Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.

Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.

Younger customers are the future, but older customers have the money. So you need both: one for the present, and the other for the future.

If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all.

The same products, services or technologies can fail or succeed depending on the business model you choose. Exploring the possibilities is critical to finding a successful business model. Settling on first ideas risks the possibility of missing potential that can only be discovered by prototyping and testing different alternatives.

We're not in the business of shaping consumer demand. We respond to it.

One of the beauties of B2B is that there is a finite number of customers. So the marketing costs are much different. You don't have to take out Super Bowl ads or plaster the New York subway system.

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.

Forget 'branding' and 'positioning.' Once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place.

Customers are a great way to finance a business for many reasons. First, customer financing is typically non dilutive. They want something from you other than equity in your business. Customers also help you fit your product to the market. And customers will help debug and improve the quality of the product.

If you really stay focused on what your beliefs are and what your customer wants, you'll find the right markets.

Our focus is on the customers and improving their experience. We believe that if we do that well, competition, prices, and profits will all take care of themselves.