Essay · 12 min read

Nail the Customer Development Manifesto to the Wall

Steve Blank Free Intermediate

Blank invented customer development, and this manifesto boils it into a short set of rules, starting with the idea that there are no facts inside your building so get outside. It is the origin of the discipline that says a startup is a search for a business model you must test, not execute. Read it for the founding principles in one page.

  • There are no facts inside the building, so get out and talk to customers
  • A startup searches for a business model, it does not just execute a plan
  • Your assumptions are hypotheses until customer evidence confirms them
Open on steveblank.com ↗

It answers 4 questions

  1. What does 'validating an idea' actually mean?
  2. How do I talk to customers without getting false positives?
  3. How is validating a B2B idea different from validating a consumer app?
  4. How do I do user research when I'm building something nobody has seen before and can't describe what they want?

Read with it

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  3. 200+ candid conversations with Indian founders and investors on how they actually found their idea, spotted a trend, and... Apple Podcasts Podcast · podcast series (45-90 min episodes) The Neon Show (formerly 100x Entrepreneur) Siddhartha Ahluwalia
  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 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
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