Article · ~8 min read

Get Out of the Building

Steve Blank · steveblank.com Free Beginner

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.

  • Your idea is a set of guesses until customers test it.
  • Facts live outside the building, not in your plan.
  • Expect to be wrong, and plan to learn from it.
Open on steveblank.com ↗

It answers 19 questions

  1. How do I talk to customers without them just telling me what I want to hear?
  2. Isn't doing things that don't scale a waste of time, shouldn't I automate from day one?
  3. How do I validate an idea without building anything?
  4. Where do I find people to interview when I have zero audience?
  5. How did real successful startups actually land their first customers?
  6. What does a 'soft launch' actually look like, and is it just a cop-out for being scared to ship?
  7. How do I find my first 10 customers to sell to when I have zero network and no inbound?
  8. What's the difference between a customer saying they'll pay and actually pulling out a card, and how do I test the real one early?
  9. What should my very first sales pitch actually say, and how long should it be?
  10. Should I do customer interviews live over a call, or is survey data good enough at the start?
  11. My market is huge on paper but almost nobody is actually paying for solutions today. Good sign or bad?
  12. How do I size a market I want to sell to businesses outside the big Indian startup hubs?

And 7 more across the hub.

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  2. The permission slip to recruit users by hand, do things manually, and deliver 'insanely great' experiences to your first few... paulgraham.com Essay · ~15 min read Do Things That Don't Scale Paul Graham
  3. A short, practical field guide to customer discovery: who to talk to, how to find them, and how many. Pairs perfectly with The... talkingtohumans.com Book · ~80 pages (free PDF available) Talking to Humans Giff Constable
  4. Video · ~25 min How to Talk to Users Eric Migicovsky
  5. Turns the vague feeling of product-market fit into a number you can move. Ask users how they would feel if they could no longer... First Round Review Article · ~20 min read How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit Rahul Vohra
  6. The cleanest distillation of the one framework that turns a customer chat into a relationship instead of a survey. The three... Sachin Rekhi's Blog Article · 10 min read A Primer on Talking to Customers From Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test Sachin Rekhi
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