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

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

“Separate the zeal of entrepreneurship from the blindness of hubris.” #CustDev #LeanStartup http://bit.ly/bdtjFD

Market segments are comprised of like people, who share a common interest, who have access to each other and who look to one another as a trusted reference.

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

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

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.

It can be argued that most technological advances either lower costs or enable new functionality that improves problem resolution within existing markets.

Fortunately, one of the big benefits of Internet marketing, especially social media, is that it may allow you to pick up neighboring segments opportunistically, while you remain dedicated to building value for your core constituency.

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