Rule No. 4: Make Continuous Iterations and Pivots

“Therefore, alpha and beta testing are Product Development functions that belong to engineering. They are about validating the product technically, not the market.”

— Steven Gary Blank

“In every company a reason can be found not to do anything.”

— Steven Gary Blank

“one approach to defining the minimum features set is to ask, “What is the smallest or least complicated problem the customer will pay us…

— Steven Gary Blank

“If they agree with you about the problems, get them to explain why they think it is important to solve them”

— Steven Gary Blank

“When one company owns over 80 percent share (think Microsoft), that player is the owner of the market and a monopolist. The only possible…

— Steven Gary Blank

“Positioning your product against the slew of existing competitors is accomplished by adroitly picking the correct product features where you are better.”

— Steven Gary Blank

“The Customer Development model consists of four well-defined steps: Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation, and Company Building.”

— Steven Gary Blank

“Many products are too hard to understand without a demo. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a demonstration is probably worth a…

— Steven Gary Blank

“One of the insidious traps of a startup is promising different customers a set of unique extensions or modifications. While it is sometimes essential…

— Steven Gary Blank

“Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous. — Sun Tzu,”

— Steven Gary Blank

“The reality is that testing an unfinished product for Engineering and testing a customer’s willingness to buy an unfinished product are separate, unrelated functions.…

— Steven Gary Blank

“Rule No. 5: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers So Use a Business Model Canvas”

— Steven Gary Blank

“Rule No. 2: Pair Customer Development with Agile Development Customer Development is useless unless the product development organization can iterate the product with speed…

— Steven Gary Blank

“Ironically, startups were often crippled by the very methodology they traditionally used to build new products.”

— Steven Gary Blank

“Imagine you were able to help customers justify the ROI for your product. That would be pretty powerful, wouldn’t it? Yep.”

— Steven Gary Blank