WEBVTT 00:00.110 --> 00:04.460 In this video, I want to talk about Steve Blank's customer development methodology. 00:04.490 --> 00:11.960 Steve Blank is a highly respectable business person and in his time this was a revolutionary methodology. 00:11.990 --> 00:19.820 Steve built three separate billion dollar companies on top of this strategy, and now he's a Stanford 00:19.820 --> 00:20.720 Business School professor. 00:20.720 --> 00:24.020 He has a popular book, The Four Steps to Epiphany. 00:24.050 --> 00:29.780 That book outlines this methodology, which is called The Customer Development Methodology. 00:29.780 --> 00:37.160 And all it is, is instead of building the product or building features or creating a whole product 00:37.190 --> 00:43.340 while theoretically thinking about it, even before you start creating it, go and talk to potential 00:43.340 --> 00:49.430 customers about their needs and you talk to current customers about what they'd like better about your 00:49.430 --> 00:50.120 current product. 00:50.120 --> 00:55.040 If you have a product out there now or you talk to potential customers who you think are your potential 00:55.040 --> 00:59.570 customers, and sometimes you might realize they're not at all your potential customers, and sometimes 00:59.570 --> 01:05.070 you'll realize that they actually have different needs than you thought they would because you were 01:05.070 --> 01:06.090 working on an assumption. 01:06.090 --> 01:12.090 And really the value of this is that you would no longer work under your assumptions. 01:12.090 --> 01:17.610 You want to start with assumptions, of course, but a great way to test them is by talking to real 01:17.610 --> 01:18.720 potential clients. 01:18.720 --> 01:21.540 Those conversations will set you on the right track. 01:21.540 --> 01:29.880 So the startup world or the business world kind of has this rallying cry that comes from Steve Blank. 01:29.880 --> 01:31.830 And this is Get out of the building. 01:31.830 --> 01:35.040 And Steve built his companies in the 80s and 90s. 01:35.040 --> 01:37.200 Now you don't have to actually get out of the building. 01:37.200 --> 01:41.430 Now you have Skype and things like this, but at the same time, you still want to make sure that you 01:41.430 --> 01:44.460 go and you talk to potential customers. 01:44.460 --> 01:52.620 If you don't do this, very likely you're going to be working on false assumptions, which are essentially 01:52.620 --> 01:56.790 going to drive your business into some dead end or some major mistake. 01:56.820 --> 01:59.220 And it's going to be hard to sell the product. 01:59.220 --> 02:03.600 What's going to make it easy to sell your product if the product is created? 02:03.600 --> 02:09.630 In a way, that's exactly how the potential customers are voicing what they want. 02:09.660 --> 02:16.500 That helps you make as perfect a match as possible so that the buying happens when the product is launched. 02:16.500 --> 02:19.730 So that's Steve Blank's customer development methodology. 02:19.740 --> 02:21.870 Now it is an industry standard. 02:21.870 --> 02:24.060 You almost cannot do business without it.