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This is Steve Blank, the person who coined the phrase, making his core argument in a few minutes: everything you believe about your customer inside the building is a guess until you go talk to a real person. It is the cleanest starting point for why a live conversation beats sitting with survey numbers when you are still figuring out the problem. Treat it as the framing, not the full method.
Steve Blank: Want Your Startup to Succeed? Get Out of the Building
On Inc. Magazine (YouTube) by Steve Blank (Inc. Magazine) About 3 minutes
- Any assumption you have about who your customer is and what they need is a guess until you test it with a real person face to face.
- A conversation lets you follow up, watch reactions, and hear the problem in the customer's own words, which a fixed survey form cannot do.
- Early stage is about discovering the problem, so you want depth and surprises, not clean averages yet.
