Steve Blank Get Out of the Building: A Startup Weekend Story
How we finished cash flow positive with no product and a $50 bar deal
By Tristan Kromer · Quick Answer: Steve Blank’s “get out of the building” means stop perfecting your product in isolation and go sell to real customers. At Startup Weekend, the KissMobs team proved this by sending a teammate to a local bar, pitching a promotion deal, and collecting $50 — before they even had a working product. As product managers, we should remember that a great demo with zero customers is still a failure; demonstrating real traction or revenue, however small, validates your idea far more than 54 hours of polished hacking.
(Steve Blank Get out of the Building Continued from Startup Weekend Lesson Learned #1) Ok…this is less of a lessons learned and more of an outright challenge. 
At the last Startup Weekend (#swmobile) the team I joined was called KissMobs. As far as I’m aware, we are the only Startup Weekend team ever to finish the weekend cash flow positive. It could be there are others, I don’t have the stats and I’ll let Franck correct me on this one. We also didn’t pay ourselves any salaries and my dividend totaled enough for a cup of coffee. A bad cup of coffee.
No Whining Allowed
My challenge relates to some of the snide anonymous comments I saw going across Floughter (I’ll explain later). There were a couple of people griping that the technical demos weren’t cool enough and it ‘looked more like a business plan presentation than a Startup Weekend.’ I half-heartedly agree and you can read some of the ways I flailed on the technical side at our own presentation in my last post. However, I’m am just as unimpressed by a great demo without customer development as I am at a business presentation with no demo. A product with no customers is not a product and it’s not a Minimum Viable Product either (sorry Eric). Regardless of how impressive your 54 hours of hacking were, you have failed.
Get Out of the Building
Steve Blank’s commandment of “Steve Blank Get Out of Building” is exactly what Katherine Webster from our team did. We had an application designed to promote bars by creating a spontaneous flash mob singles scene. We didn’t have a working product, barely had a landing page with a survey, and no marketing effort. So how could we get a customer? She went over to a local bar and talked them into giving us $50 bucks to promote a Startup Weekend after party on Sunday. She gave them enough of a pitch that they paid us $20 upfront. After we bought a domain name to put up our basic landing page, we were still up ~$10.
Floughter Wins by a Landslide
I am not saying we should have won the event. We shouldn’t have, we weren’t the best company by far. The company that won the weekend was clearly Floughter. Floughter is basically Twitter but completely anonymous, 70 characters, and local to within 70 meters. (Actually the geo-location didn’t work, but nice fake for the demo anyway.) While they didn’t get an advertiser to pay for some tweets in their stream, they did rake up about 1500 tweets in the 45 minutes after their presentation. I would argue that those users paid for Floughter with their time, even if they didn’t pay cash. I think 100 of those tweets were Tony, Nick, and myself, but regardless it was very impressive user adoption for 45 minutes of uptime. They weren’t cash flow positive, but they won by demonstrating traction. It was all the more impressive since the team didn’t have a single engineer among them. They outsourced the entire development to oDesk.
Summary of Lessons Learned
- Revenue is Good
- Whining is lame
- Get out and sell something
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Steve Blank mean by “get out of the building”?
Steve Blank’s “get out of the building” is a customer development principle that means you should stop building in isolation and go talk to real customers. As we saw at Startup Weekend, one team member literally walked into a local bar and sold a $50 promotion deal — before the product was even built. Revenue and customer validation matter more than perfecting your demo.
Can you actually make money at a Startup Weekend?
Yes, though it’s rare. The KissMobs team finished Startup Weekend cash flow positive by sending a team member to sell a bar promotion deal for $50, with $20 paid upfront. After buying a domain name, they were still up about $10. It wasn’t life-changing revenue, but it demonstrated real customer willingness to pay — which is more valuable than a polished demo with zero customers.
Is a great technical demo enough to win Startup Weekend?
Not necessarily. A product with no customers is not truly a product, and it’s not a Minimum Viable Product either. The winning team, Floughter, won by demonstrating traction — racking up about 1,500 posts in 45 minutes — rather than just showing off technical polish. As product managers, we need to remember that demonstrating real user adoption or revenue beats a slick demo every time.
How did Floughter win Startup Weekend without any engineers on the team?
Floughter’s team didn’t have a single engineer — they outsourced all development to oDesk. They won by focusing on user traction rather than technical prowess, generating roughly 1,500 anonymous local tweets within 45 minutes of launching. This proves that validating demand and getting users engaged can matter more than who writes the code.
What’s more important for a startup: a working product or customer validation?
Customer validation comes first. As the KissMobs experience showed, you can generate revenue with barely a landing page and no working product — just by getting out of the building and selling. A polished product without customers is a failure, while even a crude offering that someone pays for proves you’re solving a real problem worth pursuing.
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