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21 " Rule No. 6: Design Experiments and Test to Validate Your Hypotheses "
― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
22 " half-life of a startup VP of Sales is about nine months "
― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win
23 " Remember, the goal of customer discovery is to refine a business model enough to test it on a larger scale in the next step, customer validation. So "
24 " Earlyvangelists can be identified by these customer characteristics (see Figure 3.1): The customer has a problem The customer understands he or she has a problem The customer is actively searching for a solution and has a timetable for finding it The problem is painful enough the customer has cobbled together an interim solution The customer has committed, or can quickly acquire, budget dollars to solve the problem "
25 " Rule No. 5: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers So Use a Business Model Canvas There’s only one reason for a business plan: some investor who went to business school doesn’t know any better and wants to see one. "
26 " Develop a Reference Story "
27 " Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. —Friedrich Nietzsche "
28 " The best introduction to a prospect is through a peer. "
29 " In Webvan’s case premature scaling was an integral part of the company culture and the prevailing venture capital “get big fast” mantra. Webvan spent $18 million to develop proprietary software and $40 million to set up its first automated warehouse before it had shipped a single item. Premature scaling had dire consequences since Webvan’s spending was on a scale that ensures it will be taught in business school case studies for years to come. As customer behavior continued to differ from the predictions in Webvan’s business plan, the company slowly realized it had overbuilt and over-designed. The business model made sense only at the high volumes predicted on the spreadsheet. "
30 " In a startup, the founders define the product vision and then use customer discovery to find customers and a market for that vision. "
31 " The mantra of Phase 4 of Company Building is provided by the war-fighting doctrine of the U.S. Marine Corps: Whoever can make and implement his decisions consistently faster gains a tremendous, often decisive, advantage. Decision-making thus becomes a time-competitive process, and timeliness of decisions becomes essential to generating tempo. "
32 " A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” The "
33 " In a startup, the first product is not designed to satisfy a mainstream customer. No startup can afford the engineering effort or the time to build a product with every feature a mainstream customer needs in its first release. "
34 " The appropriate milestones measuring a startup’s progress answer these questions: How well do we understand what problems customers have? How much will they pay to solve those problems? Do our product features solve these problems? Do we understand our customers’ business? Do we understand the hierarchy of customer needs? Have we found visionary customers, ones who will buy our product early? Is our product a must-have for these customers? Do we understand the sales roadmap well enough to consistently sell the product? Do we understand what we need to be profitable? Are the sales and business plans realistic, scalable, and achievable? What do we do if our model turns out to be wrong? "
35 " the goal at this stage is not U/I perfection. It is to test a problem. It could be done with a sock-puppet if the test were set up correctly. "
36 " On the day the company starts, there is very limited customer input to a product specification. The company doesn’t know who its initial customers are (but it may think it knows) or what they will want as features. One alternative is to put Product Development on hold until the Customer Development team can find those customers. However, having a product you can demonstrate and iterate is helpful in moving the Customer Development process along. A more productive approach is to proceed with Product Development, with the feature list driven by the vision and experience of the company’s founders. "
37 " The first customer ship date does not mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them. (Read "
38 " the first product in a startup, your initial purpose in meeting customers is not to gather feature requests so you can change the product; it is to find customers for the product you are already building. "
39 " Imagine you were able to help customers justify the ROI for your product. That would be pretty powerful, wouldn’t it? Yep. "
40 " Positioning your product against the slew of existing competitors is accomplished by adroitly picking the correct product features where you are better. "