Thoughts on Steve Blank's Lean Startups aren’t Cheap Startups

I am quickly becoming a fan of Steve Blank.
Entrepreneur Corner.com introduced me to him and I now go to Steve’s site directly.  His post Lean Startups aren’t Cheap Startups is a valuable read. I wish it would have been at my hand’s reach back in January of 2009 when I began a series of mistakes that I have had to fix since April. Steve says this: “A Lean Startup is not about the total amount of money you may spend over the life of your startup. It is about when in the life of your company you do the spending."  When there is limited funding there is no such thing as “do-overs or iterations without onerous penalties.”  Isn't that the truth!

Steve goes on to write that the “key contributors to an out-of-control burn rate is 1) hiring a sales force too early, 2) turning on the demand creation activities too early, 3) developing something other than the minimum feature set for first customer ship.” Taking these steps before finding the product/market fit can be not only costly but destructive. His recommendation is to use the Customer Development process which boils down to this: “preserve your cash as you search for a repeatable and scalable sales model.”  I learned this lesson the hard way.  I try to see this mistake as being a short-term loss for a long-term gain, but some days it's hard to do.

The process that Steve writes about has two parts which are Iteration and Execution. Under iteration there are two steps: customer discovery and customer validation. The customer validation identifies the repeatable and scalable model.

As I read through this section of Steve’s post, I interpret his writing as a corroboration of the decisions I made to remove a content-layer from Interlogues. I believe that now Interlogues has a repeatable and scalable sales model.  It's a good thing, good place to be in this journey, but a costly one.

Now... let's not forget.  I still have to build the tool before I can sell it.

To get funding - to build the tool, I need to make a much better impression on investors, on anyone for that matter.  And to make a better impression, I need to improve my elevator pitch. It's not so good.  OK.  It's the pits.  I need to improve it dramatically.  So I am setting out to get it down to an art form.  I can hear you laughing, my good friends.  Really, no joke. I can curbe my passion of wanting to tell everyone every single boring (to them) detail about how great I think this tool is and will be.  So I'll get to working on creating that succinct and effective pitch.