The Startup Owner's Manual

How to Read This Book vii Preface xiii Who is This Book For? xvii Introduction xxi A Repeatable Path xxii Why a Second Decade? xxiv The Four Steps: A New Path xxix Getting Started Chapter 1: The Path to Disaster: A Startup is Not a Small Version of a Big Company 1 Chapter 2: The Path to the Epiphany: The Customer Development Model 19 The Customer Development Manifesto 31 Step One: Customer Discovery Chapter 3: An Introduction to Customer Discovery 53 Chapter 4: Customer Discovery, Phase One: State Your Business Model Hypotheses 69 Chapter 5: Customer Discovery, Phase Two: "Get Out of the Building" to Test the Problem: "Do People Care?" 189 Chapter 6: Customer Discovery, Phase Three: "Get Out of the Building" and Test the Product Solution 227 Chapter 7: Customer Discovery, Phase Four: Verify the Business Model and Pivot or Proceed 257 Step Two: Customer Validation Chapter 8: Introduction to Customer Validation 277 Chapter 9: Customer Validation, Phase One: "Get Ready to Sell" 291 Chapter 10: Customer Validation, Phase Two: "Get Out of the Building and Sell!" 357 Chapter 11: Customer Validation, Phase Three: Develop Product and Company Positioning 413 Chapter 12: Customer Validation, Phase Four: The Toughest Question of All: Pivot or Proceed? 429 The Startup Owner's Manual "Site" Map 465 Appendix A: Customer Development Checklists 469 Appendix B: Glossary 531 Appendix C: How to Build a Web Startup: A Simple Overview 541 Acknowledgements 549 About the Authors 553 Index 557

Steve Blank is a driving force in innovation, helping to radically reshape how startups are built and how entrepreneurship is taught. His new Startup Owner's Manual is his latest addition for entrepreneurial practitioners.

Steve created the Customer Development methodology that spawned the Lean Startup movement. He teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University, U.C. and Columbia. His blog, www.steveblank.com, is "must" reading among entrepreneurs. In 2011, Steve created the Lean LaunchPad, a hands-on class using Customer Development to train students as well as elite teams of scientists selected by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Steve arrived in Silicon Valley in 1978, as boom times began, joining his first of eight startups. After 21 years the results were two deep craters, several "base hits," one massive "dot-com bubble" home run, and immense experiential learning that resulted in his first break-through book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Bob Dorf is a serial entrepreneur, founding his first success at age 22 and, since then, six more--"two homeruns, two base hits, and three great tax losses," as he puts it. He's advised and/or invested in a score since. Dorf is often called the "midwife of Customer Development," having critiqued early drafts of The Four Steps to the Epiphany; he and Steve have been friends and colleagues ever since.

Entrepreneurial from his teens, Bob received his last W-2 almost 40 years ago, when he quit his editor's job at New York's WINS Radio to launch his first successful startup. In his "spare" time, he teaches "Introduction to Venturing," on Customer Development and getting startups right, at Columbia Business School.

For tons more insight and helpful tools for entrepreneurs and educators: www.steveblank.com