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These Steve Blank stories always get to the heart of the matter. What was particularly interesting about this one was that early sales were to friends and close contacts, totally skipping the "customer discovery" step.

My favorite line is Note that most VP of Sales’ have world-class antenna for career danger.

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That was the part that really stuck with me too. The previous startup I worked for sold energy-use reduction software and had initial success selling to local governments who wanted to look "green" and help a local startup (outside the valley). Once that limited market was sold to they started having trouble selling to the wider commercial market and didn't make sales targets. Government wasn't really buying to make a successful return on investment so perhaps the CD was also "hollow" as with friends and family.

Gosh. Lets just hope that we don't suffer the same fate. Of course it helps that almost none of our friends or family are industrial scale power users.

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