The Startup Owner's Manual Quotes

“Rule No. 5: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers So Use a Business Model Canvas”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Rule No. 1: There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Start by asking yourself, “What insight do I need to move forward?” Then ask, “What’s the simplest test I can run to get it?” Finally, think about, “How do I design an experiment to run this simple test?” One”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“A business model describes the flow between key components of the company: •  value proposition, which the company offers (product/service, benefits) •  customer segments, such as users, and payers, or moms or teens •  distribution channels to reach customers and offer them the value proposition •  customer relationships to create demand •  revenue streams generated by the value proposition(s) •  resources needed to make the business model possible •  activities necessary to implement the business model •  partners who participate in the business and their motivations for doing so •  cost structure resulting from the business model The”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“The best introduction to a prospect is through a peer.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Market type influences everything a company does.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Entrepreneurs often mistake their business plan as a cookbook for execution, failing to recognize that it is only a collection of unproven assumptions. At its back, a revenue plan blessed by an investor, and composed overwhelmingly of guesses, suddenly becomes an operating plan driving hiring, firing, and spending. Insanity.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Rule No. 6: Design Experiments and Test to Validate Your Hypotheses”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. —Friedrich Nietzsche”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“In a startup, the founders define the product vision and then use customer discovery to find customers and a market for that vision.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“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.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Develop a Reference Story”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“When a web/mobile startup plans to first focus on amassing huge numbers of users, eyeballs, or clicks and to “figure out the revenue model later,” this implies a multi-sided market.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“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”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“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.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“the hi-fidelity MVP is exposed to many more customers, it should look and operate much more like a finished product.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“8. Presumption of Success Leads to Premature Scaling”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap. In short, startups should welcome the rare breed generally known as entrepreneurs. They’re open to learning and discovery—highly curious, inquisitive, and creative. They must be eager to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Agile enough to deal with daily change and operating “without a map.” Readily able to wear multiple hats, often on the same day, and comfortable celebrating failure when it leads to learning and iteration.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Customer discovery includes two outside-the-building phases. The first tests customer perception of the problem and the customer’s need to solve it. Is it important enough that the right product will drive significant numbers of customers to buy or engage with the product? The second phase shows customers the product for the first time, assuring that the product (usually a minimum viable product at this point) elegantly solves the problem or fills the need well enough to persuade lots of customers to buy. When customers enthusiastically confirm the importance of both the problem and the solution, customer discovery is complete.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Most startups lack a structured process for testing their business models’ hypotheses—markets, customers, channels, pricing—and for turning those guesses into facts.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Failure is an integral part of the search for a business model.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“…no business plan survives first contact with customers.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“In large companies, the mistakes just have additional zeros in them.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“The ability to learn from missteps distinguishes a successful startup.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“The product launch and first customer ship dates are merely the dates when a product development team thinks the product’s first release is “finished.” It doesn’t mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them, yet in almost every startup, ready or not, departmental clocks are set irrevocably to “first customer ship.” Even worse, a startup’s investors are managing their financial expectations by this date as well.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Engineering begins implementation fueled by cold pizza and long nights and weekends.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. —Albert Einstein”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“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.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Products developed by founders who get out in front of customers early and often, win.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company