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

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

These product/market relationships generally fit one of these descriptions: • 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: • re-segment that market as a low-cost entrant or • re-segment that market as a niche entrant • cloning a business mod

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

Customer validation proves that the business tested and iterated in customer discovery has a repeatable, scalable business model that can deliver the volume of customers required to build a profitable company. During validation, the company tests its ability to scale (i.e., product, customer acquisition, pricing and channel activities) against a la

To succeed, founders need to turn hypotheses or guesses into facts as soon as possible by getting out of the building, asking customers if the hypotheses were correct, and quickly changing those that were wrong.

The steps: • Customer discovery first captures the founders’ vision and turns it into a series of business model hypotheses. Then it develops a plan to test customer reactions to those hypotheses and turn them into facts • Customer validation tests whether the resulting business model is repeatable and scalable. If not, you return to customer disco

This portion of the value proposition brief captures your vision for what you want your successful company to become. Over time, successful companies are usually more than a single product. What’s your long-term vision for your company? What do you want to ultimately change? Are you going to do it with a series of products? How do you expand into a

The customer discovery process searches for problem/solution fit: “have we found a problem lots of people want us to solve (or a need they want us to fill)” and “does our solution (a product, a website, or an app) solve the problem in a compelling way?” At its core, the essence of customer discovery is to determine whether your startup’s value prop

we offer parallel tracks through the book: one focused on physical goods and channels, and one focused on web/mobile products and channels. Often, the book addresses them separately. When it does, we begin with the physical channel,