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.<p>My favorite line is <i>Note that most VP of Sales’ have world-class antenna for career danger</i>.
In a small startup the analog to this is turning on a wide-scale Google adwords campaign with no site optimization, no keyword optimization, and no idea about what your customers/potential customers want, and watching Google charge you $2000 in a week.
Kind of sad how they get in a consultant and then won't listen to what he had to say.<p>Apart from that: How could you protect yourself from not being mislead from the first sales through people personally known to the founders? They might tell their friends etc., when could you assume that they buy it not through a certain personal link?
Interestingly (and probably somewhat obviously), this lines up very well with Moore's Crossing the Chasm. The company in the example assumed that their innovators (the friends/family and references of board members) would be representative of their early adopters, and possibly even the early majority. It seems to me that they fell into the crack between innovators and early adopters, without even reaching the chasm.