The Four Steps to the Epiphany Quotes

“The year-one objective for a company in a new market is to drive or grow adoption of this market. The limited demand-creation activities the company engages in are focused on (1) customer education about the new market and (2) turning earlyvangelists into “reference customers” for the emerging market to emulate. The success criterion for year one is that the number of potential customers has gone from zero to meaningful.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“If entering a new market, the year-one objective has nothing to do with market share. This idea alone is worth the price of this book. There is no way a new company can get meaningful orders from a market that doesn’t exist. Therefore, spending money on a massive launch to garner customers and market share is ludicrous.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The line from a first customer is usually, “We need a big discount because we are your first customer.” You should turn this around and say, “You need to pay list price because you are going to be the first ones to use it.” If that doesn’t sound rational to the customer, you haven’t found a visionary. Feel free to be flexible on the terms (no payment until delivery, no payment until it works as spec’d, etc.). But be tougher on discounts.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Therefore, alpha and beta testing are Product Development functions that belong to engineering. They are about validating the product technically, not the market.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Many products are too hard to understand without a demo. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a demonstration is probably worth a million. A caveat, though: Product Development teams in startups sometimes confuse “demo” with a working product. All the Customer Development team needs is a slide-based “dummy-demo” to illustrate the key points. I rarely have sold to earlyvangelists successfully without having one.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Second, does your value proposition make or reinforce an economic case? Does it have economic impact? Does it sound like your product gives a corporate customer a competitive advantage or improves some critical area in their company? If it’s a consumer product, does it save a consumer time or money, or change their prestige or identity?”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“One of the first tests of your value proposition should be, is it emotionally compelling? Do customers’ heart rates go up after they hear it? Do they lean forward to hear more?”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“If they agree with you about the problems, get them to explain why they think it is important to solve them”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“One of the insidious traps of a startup is promising different customers a set of unique extensions or modifications. While it is sometimes essential to make such promises to get an order or two, the trap is you are building custom products. Building custom products is not a scalable business unless you explicitly revise your business plan.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

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

“the first three steps of Customer Development can be accomplished with a staff that can fit in a phone booth.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The Customer Development model consists of four well-defined steps: Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation, and Company Building.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“Build it and they will come,” is not a strategy; it’s a prayer.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

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

“The first customer ship date does not mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them.”
― Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win

“The first customer ship date does not mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them.”
― Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Startups That Win