The Startup Owner's Manual Quotes

“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

“Winners also recognize their startup “vision” as a series of untested hypotheses in need of “customer proof.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Startups have been using tools appropriate for executing a known business. But startups are all about unknowns.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“A startup is not a smaller version of a large company.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Rather than asking customers explicitly about feature X, Y or Z, one approach to defining the MVP is to ask, “What is the smallest or least complicated problem that the customer will pay us to solve?” This approach runs counter to the typical cry for more features, which is often based on what the competitors have or what the last customer visited had to say. The MVP is the inverse of what most sales and marketing groups ask of their development teams.”
― Steve Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Ironically, startups were often crippled by the very methodology they traditionally used to build new products.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“An entrepreneur seeks to test a series of unproven hypotheses (guesses) about a startup’s business model: who the customers are, what the product features should be, and how this scales into a hugely successful company.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“The mix of Customer Development and Agile engineering dramatically increases the odds of new product and company success, while reducing the need for upfront cash and eliminating wasted time, energy, money and effort.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

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

“Not every piece of advice fits every situation you’ll encounter. And not every piece of advice will always work. That’s what entrepreneurs are for.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“the goal at this stage is not U/I perfection. It is to test a problem. It could be done with a sock-puppet if the test were set up correctly.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Niche re-segmentation looks at an existing market and asks whether some segment of this market would buy a new product designed to address more specific needs.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“(Unlike differentiation, segmentation forges a distinct spot in customers’ minds that is unique, valuable, and in demand.) Low-cost”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“different market types require dramatically different discovery, MVPs, and sales and marketing strategies. In”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Iterations, meanwhile, are minor changes to business model components (e.g., changing pricing from $99 to $79).”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“A pivot is a substantive change in one or more of the nine boxes of the business model canvas.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“running dozens if not hundreds of pass/fail tests—on your pitch, your features, your pricing,”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Think of your first version of the business model canvas as the starting point showing the hypotheses that must be confirmed in face-to-face or online interaction with customers.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Start with 50 Target Customers”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“•  Hypotheses require testing. Testing requires experiments to be designed”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Your goal, after enough of these customer conversations, is to be able to stand up in front of your company and say, “Here were our hypotheses about our customers, their problems, and how they worked. Now here’s what they’re saying their issues really are, and this is how they really spend their day.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

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

“turn those hypotheses into facts by getting out of the building and testing them in front of customers.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Customer discovery is done by the founders”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“When the “problem” and “solution” questions are answered with a resounding “yes,” product/market fit is achieved and it’s time to move on to customer validation.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Ultimately, only one answer matters: can we generate enough revenue, profits and growth to make this business worth our time and energy?”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

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

“Understanding what an advertiser is willing to pay to reach your startup’s audience is vital to the business model.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“very few marketers or advertisers will be interested in small audiences, even if the product or site is destined for huge audiences down the road. The”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

“Founders fail when they believe their visions are facts. Listening”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company