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121 " Before we can build and sell a product, we have to answer some very basic questions: What are the problems our product solves? Do customers perceive these problems as important or “must-have”? If we’re selling to businesses, who in a company has a problem our product could solve? If we are selling to consumers how do we reach them? How big is this problem? Who do we make the first sales call on? Who else has to approve the purchase? How many customers do we need to be profitable? What’s the average order size? "
― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win
122 " since most startups are not going after known markets (falling into the second and third categories), they don’t have a clue where their customers are. "
123 " It’s 5-10x cheaper to keep a customer than to acquire one. "
― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
124 " Since the four types of startups have very different rates of customer adoption and acceptance, their sales and marketing strategies differ dramatically. Even more serious, each Market Type has radically different cash needs. A company creating a new market might be unprofitable for five or more years, while one in an existing market might generate cash in 12-18 months. "
125 " Build it and they will come,” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer. "
126 " startups go from failure to failure. "
127 " If your business model is unknown – that is, just a set of untested hypotheses — you are a startup searching for a repeatable business model. Once your business model (market, customers, features, channels, pricing, Get/Keep/Grow strategy, etc.) is known, you will be executing it. Search versus execution is what differentiates a new venture from an existing business unit. "
128 " Startups have been using tools appropriate for executing a known business. But startups are all about unknowns. "
129 " To succeed, founders need to turn hypotheses or guesses into facts as soon as possible by getting out of the building, asking customers if the hypotheses were correct, and quickly changing those that were wrong. "
130 " Winners also recognize their startup “vision” as a series of untested hypotheses in need of “customer proof. "
131 " 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. "
132 " ready or not, departmental clocks are set irrevocably to “first customer ship. "
133 " we know unequivocally that the traditional MBA curriculum for running large companies like IBM, GM and Boeing does not work in startups. In fact, it’s toxic. "
134 " One of the insidious traps of a startup is promising different customers a set of unique extensions or modifications. While it is sometimes essential to make such promises to get an order or two, the trap is you are building custom products. Building custom products is not a scalable business unless you explicitly revise your business plan. "
135 " Obviously, every startup or company wants to get a product to market and sell it, but that can’t be done until the company understands who it’s selling to and why they’ll buy. "
136 " startups need to operate in a “search” mode as they test and prove every one of their initial hypotheses. They learn from the results of each test, refine the hypothesis and test again, all in search of a repeatable, scalable and profitable business model. "
137 " Founding entrepreneurs are out to make their vision and business real. To succeed, they must abandon the status quo, recruit a team that shares their vision, and strike out together on what appears to be a new path, often shrouded in uncertainty, fear and doubt. "
138 " successful startup solves this conundrum by focusing its development on building the product incrementally and iteratively and targets its early selling efforts on a very small group of early customers who have bought into the startup’s vision. This small group of visionary customers will give the company the feedback necessary to add features into follow-on releases. Enthusiasts for products who spread the good news are often called evangelists. But we need a new word to describe visionary customers—those who will not only spread the good news about unfinished and untested products, but also buy them. I call them earlyvangelists.2 "
139 " People lie on the web. And if you’re depending only on web data, you’ll never know it. Correlate response you get online with “ground truth.” The best "
140 " Before any meaningful customer feedback was in hand, and only a month after the product started shipping, Webvan signed a $1 billion deal (yes, $1,000,000,000) with Bechtel. The company committed to the construction of up to 26 additional distribution centers over the next three years. "