Steve Blank

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.

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.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

What is the product or service concept?

What are the product features and benefits?