Your Product Isn’t the Problem. Your Assumptions Are.
Steve Blank wrote the playbook for startup survival 20 years ago. Most founders still haven’t read it.
I talk to a lot of early-stage founders. The pattern is almost always the same.
They’ve been building for months. Sometimes a year. The product is beautiful. The features are polished. The architecture is clean.
And nobody wants it.
Not because the product is bad. Because they never stopped to ask if anyone needed it in the first place.
Steve Blank saw this coming. In 2005, he published The Four Steps to the Epiphany. It’s dense. It’s not a fun read. But it might be the most important book for anyone trying to build something from zero.
The core thesis is simple: Startups are not small versions of big companies. Big companies execute known business models. Startups search for them.
That distinction changes everything.
The Product Development Death Spiral
Here’s how most startups die.
Founder has an idea. Founder builds the idea. Founder launches the idea. Crickets. Founder adds more features. Still crickets. Founder runs out of money.
Blank calls this the “Product Development Death Spiral.” You keep feeding the machine without ever validating that the machine should exist.
The fix isn’t better marketing. It isn’t a better landing page. It’s doing the work most founders skip entirely.
Talking to customers. Before you build.
The Four Steps
Blank’s framework has four stages. They’re sequential. You can’t skip ahead. (Most founders try. It never works.)
1. Customer Discovery
This is where 90% of the value lives. The goal isn’t to pitch your product. It’s to understand the problem.
You’re testing a hypothesis: “I believe [these people] have [this problem] and would pay for [this solution].”
The trick is to ask open-ended questions.
Not “Would you use a tool that does X?” (Everyone says yes to that.)
Instead: “Tell me about the last time you dealt with [problem]. What did you do? How did it go?”
You’re listening for pain. Real pain. The kind people are already spending time and money trying to solve.
If you can describe your customer’s problem better than they can, they’ll assume you have the solution. Even if you haven’t built it yet.
2. Customer Validation
Now you build something. But not the full thing. The minimum viable version.
Put it in front of the people you talked to in step one. See if they’ll actually pay for it. Not “express interest.” Pay. With real money.
This is where most founders discover their assumptions were wrong. That’s fine. That’s the point. You’d rather learn this with a prototype than with a fully staffed company and 18 months of runway burned.
If nobody pays, go back to step one. This isn’t failure. It’s the process working.
3. Customer Creation
You’ve validated demand. People are paying. Now you figure out how to reach more of them.
This is where marketing and sales strategies actually matter. Not before. Running Facebook ads before you’ve validated demand is like optimizing the engine on a car with no wheels.
4. Company Building
The boring stuff. Processes. Hiring. Structure. You only do this after the first three steps prove the business model works.
Most startups try to do this from day one. They hire a VP of Sales before they have 10 customers. They build a customer success team before they know what success looks like for their customers.
Why This Still Matters in 2026
You’d think after 20 years, founders would have internalized this. They haven’t.
AI has made it even worse, honestly. It’s never been easier to build a product. You can go from idea to working prototype in a weekend. So founders do. They build first, ask questions never.
The tools got faster. The fundamentals didn’t change.
If you’re pre-product-market-fit, your job isn’t to build. It’s to learn.
I can’t say this enough (apparently). And learning is NOT easy. It’s hard. Don’t kid yourself thinking it’s easy and there are shortcuts. There aren’t. There are lucky people, and there are people who do the simple, consistent, hard things.
Both exist. But only one is something you can control.
Every hour you spend coding before you’ve talked to 30 potential customers is an hour you might be wasting.
(I know that’s uncomfortable. It was uncomfortable for me too.)
The One Question That Matters
Before you write another line of code, answer this: Can you describe your customer’s problem so clearly that they nod and say “yes, exactly”?
If not, close the laptop. Go have 10 conversations. Real ones. Not surveys. Not forms. Conversations where you shut up and listen.
The product can wait. The customer can’t.
Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany is available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507). If you’re building something from zero, it’s required reading. And if you’ll do something with it (not just add it to the shelf), I’d say it’s worth every hour you spend on it.
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