Steve Blank Quotes

We need to listen to consumers' needs.

If you develop a product that gets what the customer is trying to get done, you don't have to advertise; people will just pull it into their lives.

Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.

We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?'

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

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.

Every entrepreneur needs ideas, vision, and creativity - no matter what the product or service. Not only that, but the product should truly delight customers and become an essential part of their lives.

When you take the individual out of the equation, then you're making programming based on some marketer's idea of what will sell, and not based on the idea of what an individual would like.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

Customers are very demanding and well informed.

The companies that I really admire the most are the ones that have a deep visceral understanding of why people use their service, and they figure out ways of making money that are completely consistent with how people are feeling and what they are doing at the time.

When you improve your product so it does the customer's job better, then you gain market share.

Customers have different need states and life experiences.

The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

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

Our theory is, if you need the user to tell you what you're selling, then you don't know what you're selling, and it's probably not going to be a good experience.

What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.

Too many bar owners built a bar for themselves... when they should have built what their market and demographic demands!

I think, when I see entrepreneurs, they tend to talk about the market and the industry - which is obviously very important, but the most important thing is you're product. What are you selling? And does it really have product-market fit?

Being right is important. Too many great teams march off saying, 'If we build it, they will come,' and then never are able to change the idea towards something that people really want.

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.

My dad built his business by providing products he figured the customers would want.