In contrast, the Customer Development diagram says going backwards is a natural and valuable part of learning and discovery. In this new methodology, you keep cycling through each step until you achieve “escape velocity” and generate enough success to carry you out and into the next

Instead, you are going to develop your product iteratively and incrementally for the few, not the many. Moreover, you're going to start building your product even before you know whether you have any customers for it.

These assumptions cover two key areas: who the customers are (the customer hypothesis) and what problems they have (the problem hypothesis).

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.

earlyvangelist customers will be found only at points 4 and 5: those who have already built a homegrown solution

Bringing a new product into an existing market Bringing a new product into a new market Bringing a new product into an existing market and trying to resegment that market as a low-cost entrant Bringing a new product into an existing market and trying to resegment that market as a niche entrant

This rigor of no new features until you've exhausted the search of market space counters a natural tendency of people who talk to customers:

The greatest risk—and hence the greatest cause of failure—in startups is not in the development of the new product but in the development of customers and markets. Startups don't fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model.

Experience with scores of startups shows that only in business school case studies does progress with customers happen in a nice linear fashion.