How to Accelerate a Startup by Steve Blank

To put it mildly, startups have changed in the near-decade since Steve Blank wrote the entrepreneurs’ Bible, « The Four Steps to the Epiphany. » Web and mobile startups have proliferated, web services and tools abound, and entrepreneurs everywhere now develop a Minimum Viable Product, then follow Steve’s advice and « get out of the building » to solicit customer feedback on product, features, marketing and much more, iterating and pivoting their product and business model as they learn. But over the last two years Steve also developed the Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford and has yet again changed the way entrepreneurship is thought about, taught and done. Join us as he explains why the National Science Foundation has adopted his class and pay 100 teams of top scientists and engineers $50,000 per team to attend.

The Achilles Heel of Customer Development

Before you can pitch the “right” solution, you have to understand the “right” customer problem.

In Ash Maurya #RunningLean workshop in Paris last month Ash put the emphasis on the learning rather than pitching at the earlier stage of Customer Discovery which he describes here

  • Build a frame around learning, not pitching
  • Create a script
  • Start with people you know
  • Take someone along with you
  • Record your learning

 

Problem-Script-Deconstructed_White

 

Sizing the Opportunity & Market Type

  • Key concepts about « Customer discovery / Getting out of the building »
  • You only have a serie of untested hypothesis / guesses
    • Who the customers are
    • What is your value Proposition
    • Guesses about Product-Market Fit
  • Get out of the building and Turn these guesses into FACTS!
  • Sizing the opportunity / Opportunity assesment
    • Make an estimate of the Market
  • Competition / Market type
    • Entering Existing market -> Competitors so your product needs to be better, faster, more accessible or Go to a niche by re-segmenting the market
    • Creating New Market-> No competition = No customers
  • Not about pitching your product