10 resources from steveblank.com we point founders to, and the questions each answers.
📖 Book
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The foundational text of customer development, 'get out of the building' started here and became the backbone of the Lean Startup. Steve Blank's own site is the primary source.
The customer-development originator's clearest statement on scoping the minimum feature set to reach your earliest believers. The sharpest antidote to feature creep in v1.
The idea that started the lean movement, from the person who coined it. No business plan survives first contact with customers, so stop defending assumptions at your desk and go test them on real people. Short, blunt, and foundational.
Steve Blank is the person who most clearly made the case against planning everything and then unveiling it in one big moment. His argument is that the plan you build before you talk to real customers is mostly untested assumptions, so a loud coordinated launch bets the company on guesses. If your co-founder wants the big reveal, this is the sharpest starting point for why shipping quietly and learning first is usually the safer bet.
Blank, who built customer development, uses a real founder story to show how a team defaulted to 'build a smaller product' when the right move was a test that cost almost nothing. The piece pushes you to name your riskiest assumption and design the cheapest possible experiment against it. It is a direct match for the idea that your MVP might be a conversation or a fake feature, not code.
The father of customer development argues that your plan survives contact with reality only after you leave your desk and test it on real people. It is the antidote to spending months building against untested guesses. Pair it with The Mom Test to keep your scope honest.
Blank's core idea, get out of the building, is the discipline that lets a non-technical founder create real value before writing a line of code. His customer development method turns your idea into hypotheses you test with actual customers. This is the strongest argument that your early edge is market understanding, not engineering.
Blank invented the get out of the building idea, and here he makes the sharpest version of the case: until you test your assumptions outside your own head, your plan is just creative writing. It reframes research as something you do in the field with customers, not at your desk. A short, blunt push to stop planning and go listen.
Blank shows that entering a new market, an existing one, or a resegmented niche demands completely different strategies, burn rates, and patience. It reframes early versus late into which market type am I in, which then decides how long you must educate customers. A practical structure for setting realistic expectations before you launch.
Blank's own blog distills the argument from his book into a short, free read: most startups don't fail on execution, they fail because nobody confirmed a real customer had a real problem first. It is a faster on ramp than the book if you want the philosophy before committing to the full process. Good to read alongside the HBR piece for the free version of the same core idea.
