Steven Gary Blank

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

— 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…

— 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…

— 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

“Rule No. 4: Make Continuous Iterations and Pivots”

— 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…

— 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…

— 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,…

— 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…

— 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

“Founding entrepreneurs are out to make their vision and business real. To succeed, they must abandon the status quo, recruit a team…

— Steven Gary Blank

“the first three steps of Customer Development can be accomplished with a staff that can fit in a phone booth.”

— Steven Gary Blank

“A startup is in reality a “faith-based enterprise” on day one. To turn the vision into reality and the faith into facts…

— Steven Gary Blank

“The mix of Customer Development and Agile engineering dramatically increases the odds of new product and company success, while reducing the need…

— Steven Gary Blank

“the first product in a startup, your initial purpose in meeting customers is not to gather feature requests so you can change…

— Steven Gary Blank

“Rule No. 3: Failure is an Integral Part of the Search”

— Steven Gary Blank

“Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model. This”

— Steven Gary Blank

“A customer reference is something you have to arm twist to get; an evangelist is someone you can’t get off the phone.”

— Steven Gary Blank

“The line from a first customer is usually, “We need a big discount because we are your first customer.” You should turn…

— Steven Gary Blank