Steve Blank Quotes

The purpose of a business is to create customers.

The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one. Get past the product market fit, figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem. So scaling, one through N, is figuring out can you do that at scale and how big is the scale. And when people pay you more than what it costs for you to make it, does that equation end up leaving you with money left over, i.e. profits.

If we look at pricing holistically, we'll create a more solid business.

Every company's greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company.

Profitability comes from loyalty, productivity, and having a character base from which to work.

We need to take excellent care of our customers, and do so at a profit.

The purpose of a business is to create a customer.

I was in oil when oil was $8 a barrel and in construction when interest rates were 20 percent. I was looking for something everyone used and where you could build a customer base - and if it was successful, you could take it nationwide and even worldwide.

Doing a residency in any particular city requires a large repertoire to ensure repeat business.

One of the things we urge Y-Combinator companies to do is to have profitability in grasp. If you need to get profitable before your A round of money, you ought to be able to do that.

If the books are selling, the money will follow.

We are a mission-driven company. In order to do this, we have to build a great team. And in order to do that, you need people to know they can make a bunch of money. So we need a business model to make a lot of money.

I care deeply about journalism, but we need to be a business.

We know full well we cannot sell where we do not buy and we cannot sell successfully where we do not carry.

I truly believe that the combination of a strong top line together with a strong bottom line is what makes for a sustainable business.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.

Most entrepreneurs think capital is the biggest problem they have - but it's not. You can have all the capital you want, but if the market fit and ability to adjust are not present, your startup will likely not succeed.

There's nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year.

Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential.

I don't understand how you can have product-market fit and not a lot of people wanting your product. The two go hand-in-hand.

That 95 per cent. fail of those who start in business upon their own account seems incredible, and yet such are said to be the statistics upon the subject.

We lose money on signing up the customers where there's some marketing costs associated with giving them a free month. It doesn't much matter whether you make a little bit or lose a little bit.. as you well know, because you lose a ton on every copy of The Washington Post (newspaper).

Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.

Because software is all about scale. The larger you are, the more profitable you are. If we sell twice as much as software, it doesn't cost us twice as much to build that software. So the more customers you have, the more scale you have. The larger you are, the more profitable you are.