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

seldom aspire to take over an industry or build a $100 million business.

Who will the customers be, and where will they be found?

What are the product features and benefits?

What is the product or service concept?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

Customer Development is the process to organize that search.

Customer Development recognizes a startup is a temporary organization built to search for the answers to what makes a repeatable and scalable business model.

An entrepreneur seeks to test a series of unproven hypotheses (guesses) about a startup’s business model: who the customers are, what the product features should be, and how this scales into a hugely successful company.

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 time, energy, money and effort.

Getting out of the building means acquiring a deep understanding of customer needs and combining that knowledge with incremental and iterative product development.