this is an awesome presentation - I really recommend anyone that has a product and wants customers read it.

Before I wrote my first line of code for my startup I went and interviewed about 50 regular people. I'd go sit at a train station and grab a guy reading a newspaper, and ask him why he wasn't reading it on his phone.

I'd grab people on the bus or in a queue for groceries on their phone (eg, using it, not talking) and spark up a conversation as to what they're upto.

Most of the time they'd happily give me their phone number after a brief chat, I kept in contact with them all, and rang them once I'd developed my product - quizzed them what I thought and so on.

I have another 100 or so users from Mechanical Turk about my product market that I've been too busy to analyze properly.

also, here is a podcast by stephen blank that a friend just recommended http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2048

how did you use mechancial turk with your product? would you recommend i test a consumer web app with it?

This is a really great presentation. It seems to go along with the idea of releasing early and often. I've never really been comfortable or understood sales. In school my only few real experiences in sales was selling some product for some benefit or fundraiser.From that, I got the idea that successful selling required convincing some unknown person that the finished product solved their specific needs that I was basically unaware of. So it was pretty much a numbers game, more attempts mean more money.

I like the idea of a product development cycle where the customers and users are shaping the product. I also really like the idea that I can easily validate a product concept by seeing if the people advising me would actually buy in to demo. This presentation has helped me feel more comfortable with the process of successful product development and sales.

This is academic gobbledy gook. I felt like I was hearing a bad tech sales pitch flipping through this with all of its markitecture diagrams.

Beware - just because something comes from Stanford, doesn't make it meaningful or insightful. This is just restating common knowledge with flow charts.

This is based on Steve Blank's experience as a serial entrepreneur: he graduated from the school of hard knocks and is not given to academic gobbledygook.

This presentation is condensed from his book "Four Steps to the Epiphany" which is well worth reading. Eric Ries has written a good post that marries this methodology with agile at http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/customer-d...

Steven Blank has founded 4 startups, participated in 8, sat on many advisory boards and otherwise actively participated in the startup process(es).

On meta note, to elevate the level of discussion here I suggest that you try addressing substance of the matter being presented, not attacking the personality of the presenter.

I didn't attack his personality - I attacked 1) the content of the presentation 2) the presentation of the presentation and 3) cautioned against accepting this presentation as great because of the source. My argument wasn't very detailed, but it certainly wasn't an attack on the presenter.

You, on the other hand, did not defend the content of the presentation, but rather cited some qualifications of the author - ironically, just what I warned against accepting as proof of credibility.

Your point: Author is theorizing without connection to reality, more literally "This is academic gobbledy gook."

My counterpoint: Steven Blank has vast first-hand experience in startups.

Any more questions?

Academic opinions are almost always formed from experiments, and this presentation is academic.

My point was not that the author is theorizing without connection to reality. My point was I've heard the same thing said in half a sentence that he took dozens of slides to say.

But it's got that nice academic sheen!

What's the half sentence?

Don't neglect sales.

Certainly good advice but it may leave HN readers with the idea that hiring a VP of Sales person early is enough. Blank explicitly rejects this and suggests that early sales are the responsibility of the founders. In particular they have to treat their product as a hypothesis, which few successful sales folks are able to do. They treat objections as something to overcome. Only the founders can balance the question of whether they are talking to the right prospects with the right message about the right features.

Right, just like I said.... academic gobbleddy gook.

My apologies. What follows is only a portion of what's in the talk.

   1. The founders must sell. They must listen to prospects.
   2. They cannot hire a VP of sales until they have learned how to sell the product.
   3. The founders should view their business as a guess.
   4. They can see if they are correct by selling, which will confirm:
      a. Who the customer is (who will pay for the product)
      b. How to talk about the product
      c. If product has the right features

"This is academic gobbledy gook.I felt like I was hearing a bad tech sales pitch flipping through this with all of its markitecture diagrams."

Is there a reason why you thought so? Are you aware of a better way of doing this, according to you? We'd like to hear.

Looks like a movement from waterfall to iterative development in the customer devel side.

That much I got. How to do that with a startup idea, without developing enough to make a showable prototype, I donno. pclark's mechanical turk idea sounds pretty awesome.

If you would rather watch video or listen to MP3, here's the link: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2056...

Working link: http://www.scribd.com/full/10601416?access_key=key-mf4icwvtd...

And more startups fail from a lack of money than from a lack of product development.

You could have all the money in the world and still make a product that nobody wants. Looks like a guaranteed path to failure.

Do you have data to back this up?

Customers = money, do they not?