Customer Development

Steve Blank's methodology for validating business hypotheses through direct customer interaction before building products. The core principle: startups are not small versions of large companies—they are organizations searching for a business model. Customer development replaces the traditional 'build it and they'll come' approach with 'get out of the building' and test your assumptions about customers, problems, and solutions before investing in product development. The four stages: customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation, company building.

When to use it

When starting a new venture, product, or feature; when assumptions about customer needs haven't been validated; when a product isn't gaining traction and you're unsure why; when pivoting and need to discover what the market actually wants.

How it can help

Before building any product or feature, talk to potential customers. Not to sell—to learn. The questions: Do they have the problem you think they have? How do they currently solve it? Would they pay for a better solution? How much? Customer development prevents the most expensive startup mistake: building something nobody wants. The discipline is conducting these conversations before writing code, not after—when sunk costs make it harder to hear disconfirming evidence.