Four Startup Lessons Learned From Steve Blank
In a recent fireside chat, we got a chance to have a conversation with Prof Steve Blank, the originator of customer development model and godfather of #leanstartup
Prof Steve Blank speaks with Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club teams (co-chaired by Edward and Shreya) and discusses his entrepreneurial journey and provides insights into customer development using the lean startup methodology along with some advice to founders.
In the beginning of the chat, Prof Steve Blank describes his diverse career paths from US military to Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneur and subsequently his role as an educator in a number of leading universities as well as national education programmes. He has extensive experience and an impressive career, with 8 start-up companies spanning over 21 years and 4 companies he has successfully IPOed (Initial Public Offering). Here are some lessons and pieces of wisdom from our conversations:
Lesson 1: Surround yourself with those on the same mission as you
When asked about his pivotal moments during his start-up experience, Prof Blank, a serial entrepreneur, told us that for him the light bulb was actually sparked during the time between his military career and his entrepreneurial venture. Prof Blank recalls that one of his housemates came up with a new idea to make a simple beep circuit on a speaker and to his surprise his housemate decided to start their own things based on that idea. Prof Blank realised that fundamentally he could choose his own path from that moment. His advice for us is to follow our guts: “If you are smart enough and have your own ideas, you can pursue an entrepreneurial career. Not only can you start things yourself, but you can also go out and raise some money to help fund your vision” and hopefully make a significant impact. “You can be the master of your own faith”, says Prof Blank.
What I learned from this initial dialogue is to surround yourself with like-minded people. You never know –they might spark some ideas or help you develop and ignite your entrepreneurial mindset in order to go out and chase that dream.
Lesson 2: Get outside of the building and take customer feedback
During our conversation, Prof Blank shares his personal experience demonstrating the importance of founders speaking directly to customers and obtaining both customer and marketplace feedback. Building a product without customer feedback can lead to expensive, unintended results such as having the right customer but the wrong product features or vice versa, or not matching your product to customer demand. Early on in the development, a founder’s overarching goal should be to discover the value for his/her business. And the best way to do that is through a customer discovery process, leveraging a series of discoveries on how to understand customers’ pain points, as well as learning how to rapidly develop and test ideas. This feedback loop will help founders to test their ideas incrementally and iteratively.
Real-world feedback from customers is a core concept of Customer Discovery and Customer Development. According to Prof Blank, getting feedback from customers is the most valuable thing you will do as an entrepreneur. When we asked, “How should we go about and talk to customers?” Prof Blank suggested that effective ways to get customers’ feedback is not about you sharing your secret sauce, but rather about you listening to what customers actually want. Also, it means understanding that the customer discovery is not aggressive sales and it’s done on the customer’s terms not ours. So, let’s get outside and discover stuff, says Prof Blank.
Lesson 3: Understanding the Lean Startup Movement (LSM)
Next, we examined the concepts of LSM with Prof Blank. He breaks down key tools and framework to build successful start-up and can be applied to innovation and entrepreneurship in any field. Prof Blank explained that the lean startup methodology is a scientific approach where founders can generate a hypothesis and test it by developing conversations with customers. This can be done by interviewing people, figuring out whether there are unmet needs and discussing what problems they are trying to solve and how important they are. When you understand that, you can then proceed to the “Customer Validation” step. Using this analysis would allow start-up founders to measure the demand and further identify your customer characteristics. Subsequently, you can derive some insights then decide whether to validate, invalidate or modify that particular idea” says Prof Blank. In the last part, Prof Blank concluded that the LSM has three key components that are vital steps in your journey to success.
- Business Model Design
- Customer Development
- Agile Engineering
Lesson 4: How start-up founders prepare and navigate through the pandemic
In the recent economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Prof Blank’s advice to start-up founders is to be optimistic and see the bright side of this challenging time. It provides excellent unprecedented opportunities that enable easy accepted virtual meetings. Now, you can approach and arrange it with either mentors or angel investors in a short period of time. In addition to this, the customer discovery process can be initiated and performed via video conferencing now and this has never been easy before. Furthermore, depending on the business, Prof Blank urges entrepreneurs to take things slow and to have risk and mitigation analysis plans during a volatile time.
To find out more about this you can check out Prof Blank’s website:
https://steveblank.com/2020/04/07/customer-discovery-in-the-time-of-the-covid-19-virus/
Final thoughts:
I am grateful and humbled by the opportunity to virtually meet with Prof Steve Blank on Zoom. I have been following him ever since I discovered “The Lean Startup” book and subsequently received a highly recommended book titled “The Four Steps To Epiphany” from Dr Darrin Disley OBE (who is my mentor). As someone who has always been passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship, this event marks a pivotal moment and memorable experience in my life and therefore I would like to share it with everyone. To me, Prof Steve Blank is the embodiment of entrepreneurship, vision, innovation and generosity.
The most powerful lesson I learned from him is that “Approximately 80% of your career is about working hard, showing up and raising your hands rather than waiting around for someone to tell you what to do” This is such a great reminder to many entrepreneurs out there.
Finally, It is worth trying to extract and reflect on what we have learned so far and take inspiration from Prof Blank. His final comments “For me, being an entrepreneur is a rewarding experience and lots of wisdom can be learned if you really would like to put in some hard work on it.” If you read this far, stay motivated and keep going.
I hope you’re enjoying this blog post. To find out more you can check out the recorded chat with Prof Steve Blank by following this link below:
