Home > Author > Steve Blank

Steve Blank QUOTES

Steve Blank QUOTES

1 " My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

2 " In my 25 years as a technology entrepreneur I was lucky to have three extraordinary mentors, each brilliant in his own field: Ben Wegbreit who taught me how to think, Gordon Bell who taught me what to think about, and Allen Michels who showed me how to turn thinking into direct and immediate action. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

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

― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

4 " In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

5 " In the early stages of a startup, focusing on “execution” will put you out of business. Instead, you need a “learning and discovery” process so you can get the company to the point where you know what to execute. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

6 " Rule No. 1: There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside. "

― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

7 " I ask them, “If the product were free, how many would you actually deploy or use?” The goal is to take pricing away as an issue and see whether the product itself gets customers excited. If it does, I follow up with: “OK, it’s not free. In fact, imagine I charged you $1 million. Would you buy it?” While this may sound like a facetious dialog, I use it all the time. Why? Because more than half the time customers will say something like, “Steve, you’re out of your mind. This product isn’t worth more than $250,000.” I’ve just gotten customers to tell me how much they are willing to pay. Wow. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

8 " Start by asking yourself, “What insight do I need to move forward?” Then ask, “What’s the simplest test I can run to get it?” Finally, think about, “How do I design an experiment to run this simple test?” One "

― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

9 " 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. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

10 " trying to micromanage employees slows decisions and kills individual initiative. Attempting to impose precise order on how a project in a department is accomplished stifles creativity and leads to a formulistic approach to business problems. Insisting "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

11 " The greatest risk—and hence the greatest cause of failure—in startups is not in the development of the new product but in the development of customers and markets. Startups "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

12 " A business model describes the flow between key components of the company: •  value proposition, which the company offers (product/service, benefits) •  customer segments, such as users, and payers, or moms or teens •  distribution channels to reach customers and offer them the value proposition •  customer relationships to create demand •  revenue streams generated by the value proposition(s) •  resources needed to make the business model possible •  activities necessary to implement the business model •  partners who participate in the business and their motivations for doing so •  cost structure resulting from the business model The "

― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

13 " Intellect without will is worthless, will without intellect is dangerous. — Sun Tzu, "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

14 " What’s the difference between positioning the product and positioning the company? "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

15 " In short, in big companies, the product spec is market-driven; in startups, the marketing is product-driven. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

16 " Being a great entrepreneur means finding the path through the fog, confusion and myriad of choices. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

17 " When a web/mobile startup plans to first focus on amassing huge numbers of users, eyeballs, or clicks and to “figure out the revenue model later,” this implies a multi-sided market. "

― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

18 " Have we identified a problem a customer wants solved? Does our product solve these customer needs? If so, do we have a viable and profitable business model? Have we learned enough to go out and sell? Answering these questions is the purpose of the first step in the Customer Development model, Customer Discovery. This chapter explains how to go about it. "

― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

19 " Entrepreneurs often mistake their business plan as a cookbook for execution, failing to recognize that it is only a collection of unproven assumptions. At its back, a revenue plan blessed by an investor, and composed overwhelmingly of guesses, suddenly becomes an operating plan driving hiring, firing, and spending. Insanity. "

― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

20 " Market type influences everything a company does. "

― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company