Steve Blank Quotes

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.

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

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

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.

Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.

If you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, I think the first thing you do is you go and talk to a bunch of people. But then the next thing you probably should do is figure out if there's a broader demand than just people you know. That's where I think SurveyMonkey is pretty valuable to people.

Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.

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

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.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

If opening your own business is the dream, then it must start with a Dream - not only to understand what it is that you want to do, but also, how you are going to build something better than the same chaotic environment you just left.

I can't ever remember being struck by lightning when making a big decision. It's always about taking in more and more data points and making tack adjustments as you figure it out. I call customers, suppliers, industry analysts and try to get as much information as possible.

If you are planning to start a business, and if you want that business to have a hope of succeeding, be sure you are approaching your venture from a true Entrepreneurial Perspective.

Had I pursued my education long enough to learn all the conventional dos and don'ts of starting a business, I often wonder how different my life and career might have been.

If you write about a process you're about to go through, market research, and you go through it, and it doesn't echo what you've written about, you've failed.

I believe that starting any business should be as easy as a 10-year-old starting a lemonade stand.

That's the nice thing about the field of science - the test of time sorts out the truth.

One of the myths you see in entrepreneurship is that people have this dream one night, wake up the next morning, and start building it. It's actually much more of an iterative process.

I've started to believe that the agency business is a great ingredient of a much bigger business - more than just what typical advertising agencies have done.

Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model.

It's incredibly important to be - once you do have a product - acutely observational about the trends.

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.

A lot of people want to start a business, and they're like, 'I wanna start a business, give me some money to invest.' Where is your business plan? Are you investing money yourself into your own business? How is this going to work? People think that they can just come to you with an idea and have money.

It's important for founders to think about how they would build their company from scratch - again.