Steve Blank Founders Need to Be Ruthless When Chasing Deals
One of the most exciting things a startup CEO in a business-to-business market can hear from a potential customer is, “We’re excited. When can you come back and show us a prototype?”
This can be the beginning of a profitable customer relationship or a disappointing sinkhole of wasted time, money, resources, and a demoralized engineering team.
I was having coffee and pastries with Justin, an ex-student, listening to him to complain over the time he wasted with a potential customer. He was building a complex robotic system for factories. “We spent weeks integrating the sample data they gave us to build a functional prototype, and then after our demo they just ghosted us. I still don’t know what happened!”
After listening to how he got into that predicament, I realized it sounded exactly like the mistake I had made selling enterprise software.
Enthusiasm Versus Validation Finding product/market fit is the holy grail for startups. For me, it was a real rush when potential users in a large company loved our slideware and our minimum viable product (MVP). They were ecstatic about the time the product could save them and started pulling others into our demos. A few critical internal recommenders and technical evaluators gave our concept the thumbs up. Now we were in discussions with the potential buyers who had the corporate checkbook, and they were ready to have a “next step” conversation.
