Article · 10 min read

Teaching Entrepreneurship by Getting Out of the Building

Steve Blank · steveblank.com Free Intermediate

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.

  • Every assumption behind your MVP is a guess until you test it outside
  • Facts about customers live in the field, not in your building
  • Validate the problem before you invest weeks in the solution

It answers 2 questions

  1. How long should building an MVP take?
  2. Should I validate an idea before I can code, or learn to build first?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
  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. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
  4. The deepest no-code stack, database, workflows, and custom UI, for building genuinely complex web apps and marketplaces without... bubble.io Tool · platform Bubble, No-Code Full-Stack App Builder Bubble
  5. Michael Seibel, who ran YC, makes the blunt case for shipping something almost embarrassingly simple and learning from real... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~10 min video How to Build an MVP Michael Seibel
  6. The definitive essay on where good ideas come from: notice problems you personally have, don't force it. Use it as the lens for... paulgraham.com Essay · ~20 min read How to Get Startup Ideas Paul Graham
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