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The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany
 
 

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany [Kindle Edition]

Brant Cooper , Patrick Vlaskovits , Steven Blank
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)

Digital List Price: $9.99 What's this?
Print List Price: $19.95
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Book Description

October 15, 2010
Customer Development is a four-step framework for helping startups discover and validate their customers, product, and go-to-market strategy, developed by Steve Blank and an integral part of Eric Ries' Lean Startup methodology. Focused on the Customer Discovery step, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development is an easy to follow guide for finding early adopters, building a Minimum Viable Product, finding Product-Market fit, and establishing a sales and marketing roadmap.

Deemed a "must-read" by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, inside you will find detailed customer development and lean startup concept definitions, a step-by-step approach to best practices, a business model analysis guide, case studies, rich graphics, as well as worksheets and exercises. No matter the stage of your business, you will return often to this guide to learn how to build a product people want ;"get out of the building;" foster strong customer relationships; test business model risk; reach out to early adopters; conduct startup marketing; create a customer funnel based on buyers' process; and prepare your startup to scale up.

This book is both an introduction for those unfamiliar with lean concepts and highly actionable for lean practitioners. It is a user friendly guide, written to be accessible to marketing professionals, Engineers startup founders and entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, and anyone else involved in building scalable startups.

Existing companies will benefit to from applying Customer Development principles described in detail herein: for example, startups struggling to achieve market traction, or well established companies seeking to spark new innovation.

This is a business book for startups like no other. No fluff, but rather sound principles and concrete steps to take to build your business. For more information on Customer Development, please see Brant Cooper's and Patrick Vlaskovits' respective blogs.


Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brant Cooper helps startups get started. As a Lean Startup thought leader, he travels the world speaking to entrepreneurs at conferences, hackathons and workshops. Recent speaking events include the Kuala Lumpur Venture Capital Symposium, Lean Startup conferences in Vancouver and Michigan, the Forward Technology Conference in Wisconsin, the Lean Startup Challenge in Boston, and Lean Startup Machines in London, New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. Brant also consults for and advises startups on Lean Startups and Customer Development, with clients in Silicon Valley, New York, San Diego, France, Australia and Singapore.

Clients include Qualcomm, MOGL, HubKick, MotherKnows, i.TV, Lean Startup Machine, Discovr and many others.

Prior to becoming involved in the Lean Startup community, Brant was involved with startups in a more traditional way. He has over 20 years experience in IT and a long track record of bringing high tech products to market. As a leader in Professional Services, Product Management and Marketing, he has directed strategy, design, marketing and implementation of numerous products for a variety of startups including Tumbleweed, Timestamp, WildPackets, Incode and InfoBright.

He has published articles for Venture Beat and Business Insider, blogs at Market By Numbers and tweets @brantcooper.

Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur, mentor and author. He has founded two startups (now on his third).

Patrick has spoken at tech conferences nationally and internationally, including SXSW. He blogs at http://vlaskovits.com and can be followed on Twitter @Pv. Patrick enjoys advising and mentoring and serves as a mentor for the 500 Startups seed fund/accelerator as well as for The Lean Startup Machine.

Patrick organizes Twiistup, a well-attended tech/startup conference that celebrates the entrepreneurial and investment talent of the Los Angeles startup ecosystem. He also organizes the Los Angeles Lean Startup Meetup.

Patrick holds a Master’s in Economics (emphases in finance and econometrics) from University of California, Santa Barbara. When he has spare time, he can be found with his family usually on the beach or in the ocean either fishing or surfing.

Product Details


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
56 of 58 people found the following review helpful
good, but not what it says September 27, 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
First of all, this is NOT, as the title claims, a cheat sheet to The Four Steps of the Epiphany.

Right in the book, on page 21, the authors state that this book focuses on the first step only (Customer Discovery). And I quote: "Future books will attempt to tackle other portions of the Customer Development process - believe us when we say that Customer Discovery is more than enough to 'bite off' at one time."

I am docking the book one star for this. The authors should know better.

Okay, now for the real question - Is this book worth getting, or should you just get Blank's original?

Get them both. Read Blank's first, then read this one and use it to update the notes you took from Blank's book. They work well together but I would not just get this one, as you only get a small piece of the whole picture (per the authors' own admission).

It's worth $30 if you actually use it, but don't assume it's a shortcut to Blank's book. It's only 1/4 of a shortcut.
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful
By SH
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is book is a hack job - bad editing, very small amount of content stretched out through use of many blank pages, huge spacing, lots of drawings that add very little, tiny page size, and other tricks. Even with all their chicanery, the book is only 96 pages. It's hard to get past the lack of business integrity given the ridiculous price for this long article posing as a business book.

Borrow the book if you most - these guys do not deserve your money.

Other books are better and cheaper - try "Marketing Straight to the Heart" for one.
It's half the price, has 200x the amount of tips and info, and the writer has more experience.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm not sure what is going on here, but I should have read the other reviews first. Another reviewer mentioned it was only 30 pages. Seems a little longer to me, but not more than 45 or 50.

I'm giving it 2 stars because although it wasn't that bad, it's just not complete nor honest. And it's way too expensive for what it is.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
perfect
The book was for my son, a Christmas gift. It was exactly what he wanted. It was on time,
was packed perfectly. We're all happy.
Published 3 months ago by JKLMNOP
The Entrepreneur's Guide to customer Development
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development is written in a style that's fun and easy to read and understand. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Sharma
Don't buy - complete rip-off
This book is an outrageous rip-off. The authors have taken on board rather too much of their own advice and produced an exceptionally `lean' volume that does not reach even reach... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Dr Rob
Good and easy read if you don't have time for the original 4 steps to...
This book is very straightforward (and short) when it comes to explaining Steve's book so it does exactly what it sets out to do. Read more
Published 4 months ago by LD
THE LEAN STARTUP
I would recommend this book for anyone who is thinking about starting a new business or has a product they want to market. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Michael Monji
Must Read for all Entrepreneurs or Future Entrepreneurs
This book is a must read for all entrepreneurs and future entrepreneurs, whether launching a technology startup or any type of business. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Casey Armstrong
Better business planning w/EGCD by your side
Any book that skips verbosity and promotes clarity deserves four stars... I'm not interested in paying (in time) by the word. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Natasha Gajewski
This is THE book you need
Just got done with my first read through of what I'm now calling the "Start-up Bible". Awesome book guys - it is really everything I've been looking for in one place. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Red Bird 1
Annoying ads in the book!
There are "tweet this" ads throughout the book that disrupt the reading. Incredibly annoying! Go buy Steve's book instead, or buy the digital version of this book from the author's... Read more
Published 13 months ago by Braden Kowitz
Hands-on Guide to Customer Development
This is an excellent and practical guide to the customer development process pioneered by Steve Blank at Stanford. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Bart
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achieving Product-Market fit requires at least 40% of users saying they would be very disappointed without your product. &quote;
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Customer Development is a four-step framework to discover and validate that you have identified the market for your product, built the right product features that solve customers needs, tested the correct methods for acquiring and converting customers, and deployed the right resources to scale the business. &quote;
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Your differentiator is not your compelling reason to buy, but the benefit the differentiator provides, likely is. &quote;
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