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

While a value proposition seems straightforward, it can be a challenge to execute. It takes serious work to get to a pithy statement that is both understandable and compelling. It's much easier to write (or think) long than to write (or think) short.

Before any of the traditional functions of selling and marketing can happen, the company must prove a market could exist, verify someone would pay real dollars for the solutions the company envisions, and then go out and create the market.

One of the major outcomes of Customer Validation is a proven and tested sales roadmap.

The first customer ship date does not mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them. (Read the preceding sentence again. It's a big idea.) Yet in almost every startup, ready or not, the sales, marketing, and business development people are busy setting their departmental watches to the first customer ship date.

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

The Product Development process emphasizes execution. The Customer Development process emphasizes learning, discovery, failure, iterations and pivots.

A select audience versus a wide audience, and high-quality furniture versus commodity furniture, were the crucial differences between success and massive failure.

These hypotheses are the assumptions about your product, customers, pricing, demand, market, and competition you will test in the remainder of this step.

Remember, in a startup the Customer Development team is not supposed to add features; it is supposed to find out the minimum feature set for the first release,