Nivi · November 5th, 2008
“In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.”
Summary: In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank lays out a customer development process that complements a startup’s product development process. This post includes video and slides where Steve explains the ideas in his book.
“Steve Blank is a super-experienced Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur… a dude with serious street cred…
“In a nutshell, Steve proposes that companies need a Customer Development process that complements their Product Development Process. And he lays out exactly what he thinks that Customer Development process should be. This goes directly to the theory of Product/Market Fit that I have discussed on this blog before—in this book, Steve provides a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit.
“Buy it, read it, keep it under your pillow and absorb it via osmosis.”
I bought it, read it, couldn’t absorb it, put it on the shelf, and ignored it.
Fortunately, I’ve recently found a great talk and slides from Steve Blank that provide a more gentle introduction to customer development. Be gentle Steve…
The talk
How Alan Michaels took Convergent Technologies from zero sales to a $400M exit in four years by discovering his customers:
Why most startups don’t need VPs:
Why most startups fail:
(Videos: Acting on Customer Discovery, No VP’s in a Start-up, Assessing Customer and Market Risks)
Go to Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner to see the rest of the videos from Steve’s talk. Or listen to audio of the talk, which includes segments you won’t see in the videos.
The Slides
Here are the slides from another talk by Steve. They roughly complement the videos above.
(Slides: The Customer Development Methodology (pdf))
Back to the book
I’m going to take another stab at reading The Four Steps to the Epiphany and I hope you join me. I’ll let you know how it goes—please do likewise!
Update: Also read Eric Ries’ excellent What is customer development?.
Topics Books · Customer Development · Presentations
For whatever reason Steve Blank’s approach made sense to me the first time I heard him speak on a panel at SVASE before he had even completed the book. Considering your startup’s business model and product as a collection of interrelated hypothesis just seemed like a solid engineering approach to the challenge of launching a new business.
We have incorporated his “Customer Development” model into our practice as we work with bootstrapping entrepreneurs. It’s an excellent model for low cost early market exploration and offers a blueprint for an effective partnership between engineering and marketing/sales/business-development.
You should also point your readers who don’t have venture backing to the Cafe Press version since it’s $10 cheaper than Amazon ($30 vs. $40). http://www.cafepress.com/kandsranch
We have a section of our blog devoted to “Customer Devleopment”
http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/category/customer-development/ that includes info on manyof his public talks in Silicon Valley in the last three years.
Steve Blank is also speaking on November 20 at the Computer History Museum on “The Secret History of Silicon Valley” http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1224286060
Thanks Sean. Once you include the free shipping from Amazon and the hassle of dealing with anyone other than Amazon, the few dollars of savings aren’t worth it in my opinion.
Hi there
Really enjoy your site.
I too discovered this book from the pmarca blog and also confess to not reading it from cover to cover…for the same reasons…
But I’ve found it to be a great reference tool… with the following hack.
Identify your startup market type (pg 23) then gut the book to find all references to that market type.
Each reference found in this way is pure gold. And while each may not quite be an epiphany it’ll give you a pretty damn good Aha! moment. (and certainly make do till the real epiphany shows up )
You might also be interested in Steve Blank and Eric Ries new presentation, Principles of Lean Startups ,that they prepared for Maples Investments.
http://mikal.org/conclusions/2008/11/lean-startup-presentation-for-maples.html
I recently read Steve’s book, and can say I really got a lot out of it.
We are still in the “Customer Discovery” phase ourselves – so, the first 3/4 of the book I found extremely relevant and engaging. Then I speed read the last 1/4, and intend to revisit that when we reach that point.
I just found this book to have a very fresh perspective, and “make sense”. I’ve never been comfortable with the traditional startup model of raising capital and scaling as soon as you can.
Steve’s startup model seems much more practical to me. Reading this book helped give me a lot of clarity about our current strategy. I think I’d been unconsciously drifting towards the Customer Discovery approach, but always felt guilty about not being primed to scale next month. This book helped reassure me that we’re doing the right thing.
Paprika Lab » Blog Archive » Customer Development Process // Nov 7, 2008 at 12:10 am
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Excellent introduction.
This post inspired me to make an attempt at explaining customer development here: http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/what-is-customer-development.html
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