Steve Blank

At the outset of the voyage, the path is unclear and no end is in sight.

There are not a thousand different heroes but one hero with a thousand faces.

Founders, not employees, must search for a business model.

The best way to search is for the founders themselves to get out of the building to gain a deep, personal, firsthand understanding of their potential customers’ needs before locking into a specific path and precise product specs.

That’s the difference between winners and losers.

The core of Customer Development is blissfully simple: Products developed by founders who get out in front of customers early and often, win.

There are no facts inside your building, so get the heck outside.

Getting out of the building means acquiring a deep understanding of customer needs and combining that knowledge with incremental and iterative product development.

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.

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.