The Startup Owner's Manual

Steve Blank

SVB CEO Summit West 2012

#entrepreneur #startup #customerdevelopment  #leanStartup #SteveBlank #talk #video

Some pearls:

• 36:36
  here's what you can't fake: get out of the building and talk to a hundred customers in eight weeks, 100 customers, I have students who do this 100 customers in 8 weeks, and now go in with lessons learned from a hundred customers telling the story of not where I ended up, here's what I thought on day one, here's what happened when I found X, here's what happened wife, and not talking about business models or customer Development, just the story of what you learned talking to a hundred people.

• 37:48
  "... what I tell everybody who gets kind of wrapped up in the leann or customer development religion, for God's sake don't proselytize the religion, I don't care whether it's leann or customer development or whatever, come in and tell me and teach me something that you learned that you couldn't have learned anywhere else, or that you know no one else has been learning, I don't want to see your market forecast I want to see that what you know got thrown out of some of the best places, and here's what some other people said about why they'd buy, you can't fake that"

• 39:28 "... everybody you know you're a founder you're no longer polite you left good manners away the minute you took this job okay you need to be asking everybody you know for help and what you want is a name of somebody they know and my best line of starting to meet people works all the time I'll send an email or better call after 5 p.m. where their admins and secretary go home and when you get them on the phone say hi my name is X I got your name from why why is hopefully somebody they know I'm not calling to sell you something I'm calling you because so-and-so told me you were the smartest person in this industry and I need five minutes of your time"

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