Article · 10 min read

Getting Out of the Building: Customer Development

Steve Blank · Kauffman Entrepreneurs (Steve Blank) Free Beginner

Steve Blank coined get out of the building, and this is a clean primer on why talking to customers is a search for facts your building cannot give you. It frames customer discovery as testing your assumptions against real people rather than defending a plan. A short, foundational read on why you are doing this at all.

  • Facts about your customers live outside the building, go find them
  • Treat your idea as a set of hypotheses to test, not a plan to defend
  • Customer discovery is a search, expect several iterations before it clicks
Open on entrepreneurship.org ↗

It answers 6 questions

  1. How many people should I talk to, and how do I find them?
  2. How do I find a problem worth solving in an industry I have never worked in?
  3. Everyone says do things that don't scale, but where's the line between that and just wasting weeks doing manual work?
  4. How do I decide the single riskiest assumption my MVP should test instead of trying to prove the whole idea at once?
  5. I'm building outside the big startup hubs and my 'market' is the small businesses in my own town. Is that a strength or a limit?
  6. What is a concierge or Wizard of Oz MVP and when should I use one?

Read with it

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  4. 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
  5. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
  6. The origin text for the modern MVP and validated-learning vocabulary every founder now uses. Read it for the mental model that... theleanstartup.com Book · ~330 pages The Lean Startup Eric Ries
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