Steve Blank Spells Out The Deadliest Startup Sins
Steve Blank, author of recently released The Startup Owner’s Manual highlights the Customer Development process, best practices, tips and instructions contained in this book. In this book, he identifies 9 deadliest sins, which startups do often commit. He spells out them to caution the fledglings, carving an entrepreneurial niche.
Find the excerpts here:
1. Assuming you know what the customer wants
First and deadliest of all is a founder’s unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them…On Day One, a start-up is a faith-based initiative built on guesses.
2. The “I know what features to build” flaw
The second flawed assumption is implicitly driven by the first. Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.
3. Focusing on the launch date
The product launch and first customer ship dates are merely the dates when a product development team thinks the product’s first release is “finished.” It doesn’t mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them, yet in almost every start-up, ready or not, departmental clocks are set irrevocably to “first customer ship.”
4. Emphasizing execution instead of testing, learning, and iteration
In practice, start-ups begin with a set of initial guesses, most of which will end up being wrong. Therefore, focusing on execution and delivering a product or service based on those initial, untested hypotheses is a going-out-of-business strategy.
5. Writing a business plan that doesn’t allow for trial and error
Traditional business plans and product development models have one great advantage: They provide boards and founders an unambiguous path with clearly defined milestones the board presumes will be achieved.
The problem is, none of these metrics are very useful because they don’t track progress against your start-up’s only goal: to find a repeatable and scalable business model.
6. Confusing traditional job titles with a startup’s needs
The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap.
7. Executing on a sales and marketing plan
But in a majority of startups, measuring progress against a product launch or revenue plan is simply false progress, since it transpires in a vacuum absent real customer feedback and rife with assumptions that might be wrong.
8. Prematurely scaling your company based on a presumption of success
The business plan, its revenue forecast, and the product introduction model assume that every step a start-up takes proceeds flawlessly and smoothly to the next…This leads to the next startup disaster: premature scaling.
9. Management by crisis, which leads to a death spiral
The consequences of most start-up mistakes begin to show by the time of first customer ship, when sales aren’t happening according to “the plan.”
Here’s the real problem: No business plan survives first contact with customers. The assumptions in a business plan are simply a series of untested hypotheses. When real results come in, the smart startups pivot or change their business model based on the results. It’s not a crisis, it’s part of the road to success.
