The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Launching in an existing market also requires millions of marketing dollars to compete with the existing players who hope to squash you. If you don’t have millions of dollars to spend, you must build your business or prove the traction to investors by dominating a specific niche market segment. In the latter case, you are essentially in a “segmente

You want to understand the smallest feature set customers will pay for in the first release.”

As Eric Ries writes “by testing, each failed hypothesis leads to a new pivot, where we change just one element of the business plan (customer segment, feature set, positioning) – but don’t abandon everything we’ve learned.” Pivoting is at the heart of the “fail fast” concept. The sooner you realize a hypothesis is wrong, the faster you can update i

Your differentiator is not your compelling reason to buy, but the benefit the differentiator provides, likely is.

if you don’t have a lot of money, you need to act like you are re-segmenting a market. Launching in a new market requires millions of marketing dollars to teach customers what the new product does and why they need it.

Some entrepreneurs would rather nurse their doomed prized possession – the Grand Idea – rather than learning quickly that there is no market for it.

Your positioning will form the basis of your communications with all of your constituents, including customers, investors, partners, employees, etc. For your customer, the goal of positioning is to have them understand what benefit they will receive from you and why you are better than everyone else.

If you are branded by media and analysts in a way that confuses customers or lumps you with existing products incorrectly, you may never be able to undo the damage.

A “free” business model is used by a business when its primary early objective is user-growth, prior to knowing (as opposed to assuming to know) how to monetize the users through ad revenues, selling leads, meta-data, or virtual goods.