The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap.

The Customer Development process gathers customer feedback about product, channel, price, and positioning, all of which can be modified and tested in near-real time, and uses it as immediate feedback to iterate and optimize. As a result, web/mobile channel startups can move forward at “Internet speed,” an impossibility with physical distribution ch

Customer discovery includes two outside-the-building phases. The first tests customer perception of the problem and the customer’s need to solve it. Is it important enough that the right product will drive significant numbers of customers to buy or engage with the product? The second phase shows customers the product for the first time, assuring th

Getting out of the building means acquiring a deep understanding of customer needs and combining that knowledge with incremental and iterative product development. The mix of Customer Development and Agile engineering dramatically increases the odds of new product and company success, while reducing the need for upfront cash and eliminating wasted

On Day One, a startup is a faith-based initiative built on guesses.

Companies in execution suffer from a “fear of failure culture“ (quite understandable since they were hired to execute a known job spec.) Startups with Customer Development Teams have a “learning and discovery” culture for search. The fear of making a move before the

Markets with customer/market risk are those where the unknown is whether customers will adopt the product.

Customer discovery translates a founder’s vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creates a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.

Early-stage ventures fall into two types: those with customer/market risk and those with invention risk.