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

In a Nutshell: A product with the fewest number of features needed to achieve a specific objective, and users are willing to “pay” in some form of a scarce resource.

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

Word of mouth regarding products works best among those who share a need and a means to communicate a solution. “Access to each other” indicates a common methodology to reach them. Indirect knowledge (e.g., PR, testimonials, etc.) of like individuals buying a product is a powerful influence. One

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.

most startups fail because they didn’t develop their market, not because they didn’t develop their product.

Early Adopters want to help you and (here is the best bit) want you to be successful.

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

For example, if you develop “Facebook for senior citizens,” you and your techy friends, as well as tech savvy pundits will see that you have segmented the social networking market for the senior citizens’ market niche. All well and good, but if the senior citizens have never heard of Facebook, what good does the comparison do you? Try a landing pag

The movement to each phase is hindered by a gap caused by the difference between a product’s requirements and the buying habits of customers from the subsequent phase.