The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

You need to understand what the analysts believe are the trends, the players, business models, and key metrics.

The ability to learn from those missteps is what distinguishes a successful startup from those whose names are forgotten among the vanished.

Customer Discovery, Customer Validation, Customer Creation, and Company Building. These steps mesh seamlessly and support a startup's ongoing Product Development activities. Each results in specific deliverables to be described in subsequent chapters.

Accordingly, develop a solution-oriented presentation that describes the product in terms of solving the customer's problem.

you may want to find a business mentor, someone who has been through the startup grind before.

This is somewhat amazing, since in a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.

product, does it save a consumer time or money, or change their prestige or identity?

contrast, fast-to-market says if a new market is large, whoever wins the first few sales is not going to matter. What matters is learning how to make money from day one.

In reality none of these is the true objective. Simply put, a startup should focus on reaching a deep understanding of customers and their problems, their pains, and the jobs they need done to discover a repeatable roadmap of how they buy, and building a financial model that results in profitability.