The Four Steps to the Epiphany Quotes

“The reality is that testing an unfinished product for Engineering and testing a customer’s willingness to buy an unfinished product are separate, unrelated functions. Customer Validation is not about having customers pay for products that are engineering tests. It’s about validating the entire market and business model.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“one approach to defining the minimum features set is to ask, “What is the smallest or least complicated problem the customer will pay us to solve?”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“In a startup, the founders and Product Development team define the first product. The job of the Customer Development team is to see whether there are customers and a market for that vision.”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

“be their daily function, but it wasn't their job. The mission of Marketing at SuperMac was to: Generate end-user demand Drive that demand into our sales channels Educate our sales channels Help Engineering understand customer needs These”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

“Namely, there is a true and repeatable path to success, a path that eliminates or mitigates the most egregious risks and allows the company to grow into a large, successful enterprise.”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

“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?”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model. This”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“By launch time, earlyvangelists need to be happy enough with your company and product to enthusiastically tell others about it.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The issue is not being first to market, but understanding the type of market your company is going to enter.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“startups whose mantra is “we have to be first to market” usually lose. There”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Before any of the traditional functions of selling and marketing can happen, the company must prove a market could exist, verify someone would pay real dollars for the solutions the company envisions, and then go out and create the market. These”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“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”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“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.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“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.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“And since the facts live outside the building, the primary activity is to get in front”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“goal of Customer Discovery amounts to this: turning the founders’ initial hypotheses about their business model, market and customers into facts.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The job of the Customer Development team is to see whether there are customers and a market for that vision.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“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?).”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Gen. George Patton said, “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“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.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“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.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Time after time, only after first customer ship, do startups discover their early customers don’t scale into a mainstream market, the product doesn’t solve a high-value problem, or the cost of distribution is too high.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“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.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Only in America are the streets paved with gold.”)”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“In every company a reason can be found not to do anything.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“A customer reference is something you have to arm twist to get; an evangelist is someone you can’t get off the phone.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“There are two types of market resegmentation: as a segmented niche or as a low-cost provider.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Differentiation in an existing market can take one of three forms. You can describe differences in product attributes (faster, cheaper, less filling, 30% more), in distribution channel (pizza in 30 minutes, home delivery, see your nearest dealer, build it yourself on the Web), or in service (five-year, 50,000-mile warranty; 90-day money-back guarantee; lifetime warranty).”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Remember, the goal of positioning is to control the public’s perception of a product or service as it relates to competitors’ alternatives.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win