Steve Blank Quotes

The Lean Startup is a process for turning ideas into commercial ventures. Its premise is that startups begin with a series of untested hypotheses. They succeed by getting out of the building, testing those hypotheses and learning by iterating and refining minimal viable products in front of potential customers.

The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.

For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core.

Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

The lean startup method is not about cost, it is about speed.

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

Not only is it possible to do lean startup in federal government, but it's the most effective way to drive change in the federal government.

When talking to first-time entrepreneurs, I often ask them: 'How do you know that people want your product or service?' As you can expect, the answer is often that they don't yet, but will know once they launch. And they're right. That's why it's critical to launch as quickly as possible so you can get that feedback.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Unlike many other startup processes, Customer Development is deep, detailed, and rigorous.

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

Build something, make something, test something, sell something. Learn for yourself if your idea is a good one.

Using the Product Development Waterfall diagram for Customer Development activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature. They both measure something, but not the thing you wanted.

The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build-the thing customers want and will pay for-as quickly as possible. In other words, the Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the development of innovative new products that emphasizes fast iteration and customer insight, a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same time.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

The faster you can get your ideas in contact with the real world, the faster you can discover what is broken with your idea.

In a startup, in the early days, it can be hard to explain what you do.

I basically apply with my teams the lean startup principles I used in the private sector - go into Silicon Valley mode, work at startup speed, and attack, doing things in short amounts of time with extremely limited resources.

I take a lean-startup approach: creating agile, interdisciplinary teams that get the minimum viable product to market as soon as possible. It's my job to be entrepreneur-in-residence, an internal change agent.

I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.

The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.