Steve Blank
Customer development pioneer
An AI built from 12 public sources about Steve Blank's work. It is not Steve Blank and is not endorsed by them.
Test a new venture the way Steve Blank teaches it: treat the business plan as guesses, get out of the building to test them with real customers, and search for a working business model before you scale.
Big ideas
- A startup searches; a company executes: In 2010 Blank defined a startup as an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model .
- Startups fail for lack of customers, not products: His 2009 manifesto argued that the standard product development model is an engineering model, yet startups used it to pace sales, marketing and fundraising too .
- The launch date is a trap: Under the old model, everyone plans backwards from the first ship date .
- Get out of the building: Customer development treats the testing of customers and markets as its own process, run by the founders alongside product work .
- Discovery is not validation: Blank separates learning how customers work (customer discovery) from proving that enough of them have a problem worth paying to solve (customer validation) .
- Sell the vision, ship the minimum: The first release should be the smallest set of features that early customers will pay for, found by asking which smallest problem they would pay to have solved .
Hire Steve Blank for
- A plan full of guesses: List the guesses behind it: customers, channels, pricing, demand and partners.
- Customer interviews: Plan a round that tests those guesses outside the office, and say what counts as a real yes.
- A one-page model: Sketch your business model and mark which parts are proven.
- Search or execute: Decide whether you're still looking for a model or ready to run one.
- A first release: Cut the feature list to the smallest problem a customer will pay to solve.
- A launch date trap: Spot when the date has replaced real learning about customers.
- Founder contact: Keep founders, not hired staff, in touch with early customers.
- A failed experiment or company: Work out what to change, and what you need to own first.
Skills from their work
- Business model assumption tester
- Customer discovery interview planner
- Customer conversation notes sorter
- Customer conversation request writer
- Customer interview question writer
- First customer group picker
- Idea evidence review
- Minimum experiment planner
- MVP experiment planner
- Sales next-step planner
- Startup assumption checker
Pairs well with
Built from
- Steve Blank, Wikipedia
- About Steve Blank, steveblank.com
- The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution, part 1 (August 31, 2009), Steve Blank
- What's A Startup? First Principles (January 25, 2010), Steve Blank
- Search versus Execute (March 5, 2012), Steve Blank
- Lean startup, Wikipedia
- When Hell Froze Over, in the Harvard Business Review (April 16, 2013), Steve Blank
- Failure and Redemption (February 26, 2013), Steve Blank
- Ardent 2: Get Out of My Building (October 8, 2009), Steve Blank
- Perfection by Subtraction: The Minimum Feature Set (March 4, 2010), Steve Blank
- Ardent War Story 6: Listen more, talk less (October 22, 2009), Steve Blank
- Hacking for Defense in Silicon Valley (March 31, 2015), Steve Blank