Steve Blank is the creator of the Lean Startup movement, a serial entrepreneur-turned-academic who is an adjunct professor at Stanford University and a senior fellow at Columbia University.
He helped start the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps; Hacking for Defense and its sister programs, including Hacking for Diplomacy and Hacking for Oceans.With in-person classes canceled, were about to start our online versions ofHacking for Defense and Hacking for Oceans(andhere).
The classes are built on theLean Startup methodology: customer discovery, agile engineering and the business/mission model canvas.
So how do our students get out of the building to do customer discovery when they cant leave home? How do startups do it?Talking to customers seems like a simple idea, but most founders find its one of the hardest things they have to do.
Entrepreneurs innately believe they understand a customers problem and just need to spend their time building a solution.
We now have a half-century of data to say thats wrong.
To build products people want and will really use, founders first need to validate the problem/need, then understand whether their solution solves that problem (i.e.
finding product-market fit).Finally, to have a better chance of a viable enterprise, they need to test all the other hypotheses in their business/mission model (pricing, demand creation, revenue, costs, etc.).The key principles of customer development are:There are no facts inside the building, so get the heck outside.All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.You can test your hypotheses with a series of experiments with potential customers.Now with sheltering-in-place the new normal, well add a fourth principle: