Steve Blank, Author Of ‘The Lean Startup’ Gives His Advice To Startups

Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and co-founder of the Gordian Knot Centre for National Security Innovation. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship.

Credited with launching the Lean Startup movement and the curriculums for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps and Hacking for Defense and Diplomacy, he’s changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialised, and how companies and the government innovate.

Steve is the author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner’s Manual which revolutionised how startups were built. His Harvard Business Review cover story redefined how large companies can innovate at speed.

 

If You Had One Piece of Advice For A Small Startup, What Would It Be?

 

Don’t confuse your passion with the facts outside the building

All you have on Day 1 is a series of untested assumptions — a 20-dollar word is “hypotheses” — about all the pieces that turn an idea into a company. We call these parts a company’s business model: This includes: Who are your customers? What’s your distribution channel? How do we price and position the product? How do we create end user demand? Who are our partners? Where/how do we build the product? How do we finance the company, etc.

The odds are that one or more of your hypotheses will be wrong. So you need to get out of the building and test them.

It’s very simple to do. I tell my students, “Humor me. Do the 10-person test: Find 10 people and talk to them. Does your product solve a problem they have? Will they write you a check?”

 

 

What Should Startup Founders Do To Keep Their Companies ‘Lean’?

 

I found that startups that are successful raising money always spend that amount plus a dollar. You should be thinking about the minimum viable company as well as your minimum viable project (MVP).

Consider how early you need to layer on all the accoutrements of a large organisation and focus on the most important parts:  product-market fit, building a product that scales, and building a repeatable business model.

Everything else is noise –getting a fancy building before you have customers or revenue, thinking you need to look the part. The burn rate will kill you.

 

What 3 books do you think should be on every founder’s shelf?

 

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

My first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder

 

Any Final Thoughts?

 

If you aren’t playing with new AI tools at least every month – either personally or getting demos of them — you’re going to be left behind and miss a huge opportunity.