Steve Blank and customer development

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: In this video I want to talk about Steve blanks customer development methodology Steve Blank is a highly respectable business person and in his time this was a revolutionary methodology this video is brought to you by Appy Pie Academy, Steve build three separate billion dollar companies on top of this strategy and now he's a Stanford Business School professor he has a popular book for the four steps to Epiphany and that book outlines this methodology which is called the customer development methodology and all it is is instead of building the product or building features or creating a whole product while theoretically thinking about it instead of doing that even before you start creating it go and talk to potential customers about their needs and you talk to current customers about what they'd like better about your current product if you have a product out there now or you talk to potential customers who you think are your potential customers and sometimes you might realize they're not at all your potential customers and sometimes you'll realize they actually have different needs then you thought they would because you were working on an assumption and really the value of this is that you would no longer work under your assumptions you want to start with assumptions of course but a great way to test them is by talking to real potential clients and those conversations will set you on the right track so the startup world or the business world kind of has this rallying cry that comes from Steve Blank and this is get out of the building and Steve built his companies in the 80s and 90s now you don't have to actually get out of the building now you have Skype and things like this but at the same time you still want to make sure that you go out and you talk to potential customers if you don't do this very likely almost guaranteed you're gonna be working on false assumptions which are essentially going to drive your business into some dead end or some major mistake and it's going to be hard to sell the product what's going to make it easy to sell your product if the product is created in a way that's exactly how the potential customers are voicing what they want that helps you make as perfectly match as possible so that the buying happens when the product is launched so that's Steve blanks customer development methodology now it is an industry standard you almost cannot do business without it.