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141 " Customer Development is the process to organize the search for the business model. "
― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
142 " A startup is in reality a “faith-based enterprise” on day one. To turn the vision into reality and the faith into facts (and a profitable company), a startup must test those guesses, or hypotheses, and find out which are correct. "
― Steve Blank , The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win
143 " Products developed by founders who get out in front of customers early and often, win. "
144 " Customer Development recognizes a startup is a temporary organization built to search for the answers to what makes a repeatable and scalable business model. Customer Development is the process to organize that search. "
145 " • Hypotheses require testing. Testing requires experiments to be designed "
146 " The Customer Development model consists of four well-defined steps: Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation, and Company Building. "
147 " the first three steps of Customer Development can be accomplished with a staff that can fit in a phone booth. "
148 " To do this, you need to leave guesswork behind and get “outside the building” in order to learn what the high-value customer problems are, what about your product solves these problems, and who specifically are your customer and user (for example, Who has the power to make or influence the buying decision and who will use the product on a daily basis?). "
149 " The job of the Customer Development team is to see whether there are customers and a market for that vision. "
150 " The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. —Albert Einstein "
151 " Consider Lifetime Value: How much will the customer ultimately spend not just in the first sale but over the life of his or her relationship with the company? SAAS "
152 " You tend to collect a list of features that if added, will get one additional customer to buy. Soon you have a 10-page feature list just to sell 10 customers. The goal is to have a single paragraph feature list that can sell to thousands of customers. "
153 " Money is the lifeblood of startups. You stay in business until you run out of it. This "
154 " In startups the emphasis is on “get it done, and get it done fast.” So it’s natural that heads of Sales and Marketing believe they are hired for what they know, not what they can learn. They assume their prior experience is relevant in this new venture. They assume they understand the customer problem and therefore the product that needs to be built and sold. Therefore they need to put that knowledge to work and execute the product development, sales and marketing processes and programs that have worked for them before. This is usually a faulty assumption. 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? "
155 " goal of Customer Discovery amounts to this: turning the founders’ initial hypotheses about their business model, market and customers into facts. "
156 " Only in America are the streets paved with gold.”) "
157 " And since the facts live outside the building, the primary activity is to get in front "
158 " Engineering begins implementation fueled by cold pizza and long nights and weekends. "