“Get out of the building” is Steve Blank’s most-quoted directive: founders cannot validate hypotheses or discover real customer needs from a conference room.

Customer development is a four-step process developed by Steve Blank that systematises how startups discover and validate their market before scaling product or sales.

“Strong opinions, weakly held” is the decision-making discipline of forming sharp, specific positions on uncertain questions while remaining willing to revise those positions when new evidence arrives.

Schlep blindness is Paul Graham’s term for the tendency of founders to avoid startup ideas that involve painful, tedious, or unpleasant execution — even when those ideas are the most defensible commercial opportunities.

A tarpit idea, a term popularised by Y Combinator partners, is a startup concept that persistently attracts founders despite a consistent track record of failure.

The idea maze, popularised by Balaji Srinivasan, is the framework that a startup idea is not a single insight but a navigable map of all the paths, dead-ends, branch points, and competing approaches that previous attempts have explored.

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) is a product-development framework developed by Clayton Christensen that reframes customer needs around the underlying “job” a customer is trying to accomplish, not the demographic profile of the customer.

The 10x product rule states that for a customer to adopt a new product over an entrenched alternative, the new product must be approximately ten times better on the dimension that matters most.

A wedge (or beachhead) is the narrow initial customer segment or use case that a startup dominates before expanding into adjacent segments. The wedge metaphor evokes a single thin entry point that, once established, can be widened.

The painkiller vs. vitamin distinction describes whether a product solves an acute, immediate, expensive problem (a painkiller) or merely improves something that already works adequately (a vitamin).