Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Customer Service: By establishing processes and culture that focus on excelling at customer service, this potential core allows you to retain customers at a very high rate as compared to competitors, and thereby avoid costly churn. It will also allow you to attract and obtain customers in a much more efficient way than others in the market, as your

The Quantified Value Proposition is framed by the top priority of the Persona. You first need to understand and map the “as-is” state in a way familiar to the customer, using the Full Life Cycle Use Case. Then, map out the “possible” state of using your product, clearly indicating where the customer receives value based on the Persona’s top priorit

Some of the most exciting innovations of our time, such as Google, iTunes, Salesforce.com, Netflix, Zipcar, and many more are, at their core, business model innovations.

The 24 Steps are discrete and can be grouped into six themes.

A business model is a framework by which you extract from your customers some portion of the value your product creates for them. It is the idea that the amount of money your venture gets paid is based on how much value the customer gets from your product, and not some arbitrary markup based on your costs.

A target customer is a group of potential customers who share many characteristics and who would all have similar reasons to buy a particular product.

Take your resources and apply them to a narrow, carefully defined new market that you can dominate.

4. Lead Customers: Who are the most influential customers that others look to for thought leadership and adoption of new technology? These are sometimes referred to as “lighthouse customers” because they are so respected that when they buy, others look to them and follow their lead, gaining you instant credibility. Some people call these customers “ea

What is their gender? What is their age range? What is their income range? What is their geographic location? What motivates them? What do they fear most? Who is their hero? Where do they go for vacation? For dinner? Before work? What newspapers do they read? Websites? What TV shows do they watch? What is the general reason they are buying this pro

Focus is very important because entrepreneurs have very limited time and resources and so must be hyper-efficient. Focus is so crucial to determining your target customer that I refer to the first five steps of the 24 Steps—from Market Segmentation to profiling your Persona—as “The Search for the Holy Grail of Specificity” (see Figure 0.1