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41 " When one company owns over 80 percent share (think Microsoft), that player is the owner of the market and a monopolist. The only possible move you have is resegmenting this market. "
― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win
42 " Technology is adopted in phases by distinct groups: technology enthusiasts, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives, and skeptics. "
43 " All new companies and new products begin with an almost mythological vision—a hope of what could be, with a goal few others can see. "
44 " 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. Customer Validation is not about having customers pay for products that are engineering tests. It’s about validating the entire market and business model. "
45 " one approach to defining the minimum features set is to ask, “What is the smallest or least complicated problem the customer will pay us to solve? "
46 " Customer Development experiments are short, simple, objective pass/fail tests. You’re looking for a strong signal in the signal/noise noise ratio, something like five of the first 12 customers you call on saying “I need this right now, even if it’s still buggy.” Early tests aren’t necessarily precise, but should give you a “good enough” signal to proceed. "
― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
47 " What happens when you fully staff sales and marketing and you haven’t nailed who your customers are and why they should buy your product? Sales starts missing its numbers. The board gets concerned. The VP of Sales comes to a board meeting, still optimistic, and provides a set of reasonable explanations. The board raises a collective eyebrow. The VP goes back to the field and exhorts the troops to work harder. "
48 " turn those hypotheses into facts by getting out of the building and testing them in front of customers. "
49 " Start with 50 Target Customers "
50 " Winners throw out the traditional product management and introduction processes they learned at existing companies. Instead, they combine agile engineering and Customer Development to iteratively build, test and search for a business model, turning unknowns into knowns. Winners also recognize their startup “vision” as a series of untested hypotheses in need of “customer proof.” They relentlessly test for insights, and they course-correct in days or weeks, not months or years, to preserve cash and eliminate time wasted on building features and products that customers don’t want. "
51 " Rule No. 2: Pair Customer Development with Agile Development Customer Development is useless unless the product development organization can iterate the product with speed and agility. "
52 " Facts live outside the building, where future customers live and work... "
53 " Rule No. 3: Failure is an Integral Part of the Search "
54 " The goal of Customer Development is not to avoid spending money but to preserve cash while searching for the repeatable and scalable business model. Once found, then spend like there’s no tomorrow. "
55 " Rule No. 4: Make Continuous Iterations and Pivots "
56 " be their daily function, but it wasn't their job. The mission of Marketing at SuperMac was to: Generate end-user demand Drive that demand into our sales channels Educate our sales channels Help Engineering understand customer needs These "
57 " reduce startup infant mortality by making everything you do less wasteful and more cash-efficient. "
58 " Customer Development is damn hard work. You can’t fake it. You can’t just do the slides or “do” the process in a weekend. It’s a full-time, full-body-contact sport. It’s a long-term commitment to changing the way a startup is built. But it’s also proven to increase the chances of startup success. "
59 " A startup is not a smaller version of a large company. "
60 " what exactly is a startup? A startup is not a smaller version of a large company. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model "