Customer Reviews

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

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This book is required reading at our company - even for the engineers. Following its methodology, we were able to uncover flaws in our product and business plan and correct them before they became costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing our assumptions - these are all part of our company culture, thanks in no small part to this book. Essential reading for anyone starting something new.

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Above is what I wrote about this book two years ago. Here's what I wrote on my blog, after having more time to think about it:

What is customer development?

When we build products, we use a methodology. For software, we have many - you can enjoy a nice long list on Wikipedia. But too often when it's time to think about customers, marketing, positioning, or PR, we delegate it to "marketroids" or "suits." Many of us are not accustomed to thinking about markets or customers in a disciplined way. We know some products succeed and others fail, but the reasons are complex and the unpredictable. We're easily convinced by the argument that all we need to do is "build it and they will come." And when they don't come, well, we just try, try, again.

What's wrong with this picture?

Steve Blank has devoted many years now to trying to answer that question, with a theory he calls Customer Development. This theory has become so influential that I have called it one of the three pillars of the lean startup - every bit as important as the changes in technology or the advent of agile development.

You can learn about customer development, and quite a bit more, in Steve's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. I highly recommend this book for all entrepreneurs, in startups as well as in big companies. Here's the catch. This is a self-published book, originally designed as a companion to Steve's class at Berkeley's Haas school of business. And Steve is the first to admit that it's a "turgid" read, without a great deal of narrative flow. It's part workbook, part war story compendium, part theoretical treatise, and part manifesto. It's trying to do way too many things at once. On the plus side, that means it's a great deal. On the minus side, that has made it a wee bit hard to understand.

Some notable bloggers have made efforts to overcome these obstacles. VentureHacks did a great summary, which includes slides and video. Marc Andreeson also took a stab, calling it "a very practical how-to manual for startups ... a roadmap for how to get to Product/Market Fit." The theory of Product/Market Fit is one key component of customer development, and I highly recommend Marc's essay on that topic.

Still, I feel the need to add my two cents. There's so much crammed into The Four Steps to the Epiphany that I want to distill out what I see as the key points:

1. Get out of the building. Very few startups fail for lack of technology. They almost always fail for lack of customers. Yet surprisingly few companies take the basic step of attempting to learn about their customers (or potential customers) until it is too late. I've been guilty of this many times in my career - it's just so easy to focus on product and technology instead. True, there are the rare products that have literally no market risk; they are all about technology risk ("cure for cancer"). For the rest of us, we need to get some facts to inform and qualify our hypotheses ("fancy word for guesses") about what kind of product customers will ultimately buy.

And this is where we find Steve's maxim that "In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions." Most likely, your business plan is loaded with opinions and guesses, sprinkled with a dash of vision and hope. Customer development is a parallel process to product development, which means that you don't have to give up on your dream. We just want you to get out of the building, and start finding out whether your dream is a vision or a delusion. Surprisingly early, you can start to get a sense for who the customer of your product might be, how you'll reach them, and what they will ultimately need. Customer development is emphatically not an excuse to slow down or change the plan every day. It's an attempt to minimize the risk of total failure by checking your theories against reality.

2. Theory of market types. Layered on top of all of this is a theory that helps explain why different startups face wildly different challenges and time horizons. There are three fundamental situations that change what your company needs to do: creating a new market (the original Palm), bringing a new product to an existing market (Handspring), and resegmenting an existing market (niche, like In-n-Out Burger; or low-cost, like Southwest Airlines). If you're entering an existing market, be prepared for fast and furious competition from the incumbent players, but enjoy the ability to fail (or succeed) fast. When creating a new market, expect to spend as long as two years before you manage to get traction with early customers, but enjoy the utter lack of competition. What kind of market are you in? The Four Steps to the Epiphany contains a detailed approach to help you find out.

3. Finding a market for the product as specified. When I first got the "listening to customers" religion, my plan was to talk to as many customer as possible, and build them as many features as they asked as possible. This is a common mistake. Our goal in product development is to find the minimum feature set required to get early customers. In order to do this, we have our customer development team work hard to find a market, any market, for the product as currently specified. We don't just abandon the vision of the company at every turn. Instead, we do everything possible to validate the founders' belief.

The nice thing about this paradigm is it sets the company up for a rational discussion when the task of finding customers fails. You can start to think through the consequences of this information before it's too late. You might still decide to press ahead building the original product, but you can do so with eyes open, knowing that it's going to be a tough, uphill battle. Or, you might start to iterate the concept, each time testing it against the set of facts that you've been collecting about potential customers. You don't have to wait to iterate until after the splashy high-burn launch.

4. Phases of product & company growth. The book takes its name from Steve's theory of the four stages of growth any startup goes through. He calls these steps Customer Discovery (when you're just trying to figure out if there are any customers who might want your product), Customer Validation (when you make your first revenue by selling your early product), Customer Creation (akin to a traditional startup launch, only with strategy involved), and Company Building (where you gear up to Cross the Chasm). Having lived through a startup that went through all four phases, I can attest to how useful it is to have a roadmap that can orient you to what's going on as your job and company changes.

As an aside, here's my experience: you don't get a memo that tells you that things have changed. If you did, it would read something like this: "Dear Eric, thank you for your service to this company. Unfortunately, the job you have been doing is no longer available, and the company you used to work for no longer exists. However, we are pleased to offer you a new job at an entirely new company, that happens to contain all the same people as before. This new job began months ago, and you are already failing at it. Luckily, all the strategies you've developed that made you successful at the old company are entirely obsolete. Best of luck!"

5. Learning and iterating vs. linear execution. I won't go through all four steps in detail (buy the book already). I'll just focus on the paradigm shift represented by the first two steps and the last two steps. In the beginning, startups are focused on figuring out which way is up. They really don't have a clue what they should be doing, and everything is guesses. In the old model, they would probably launch during this phase, failing or succeeding spectacularly. Only after a major, public, and expensive failure would they try a new iteration. Most people can't sustain more than a few of these iterations, and the founders rarely get to be involved in the later tries.

The root of that mistake is premature execution. The major insight of The Four Steps to the Epiphany is that startups need time spent in a mindset of learning and iterating, before they try to launch. During that time, they can collect facts and change direction in private, without dramatic and public embarrassment for their founders and investors. The book lays out a disciplined approach to make sure this period doesn't last forever, and clear criteria for when you know it's time to move to an execution footing: when you have a repeatable and scalable sales process, as evidenced by early customers paying you money for your early product.

It slices, it dices. It's also a great introduction to selling and positioning a product for non-marketeers, a workbook for developing product hypotheses, and a compendium of incredibly useful tactics for startups young and old.

When I first encountered this book, my first impulse was as follows. I bought a bunch of copies, gave them out to my co-founders and early employees, and then expected the whole company's behavior would radically change the next day. That doesn't work (you can stop laughing now). This is not a book for everyone. I've only had luck sharing it with other entrepreneurs who are actually struggling with their product or company. If you already know all the answers, you can skip this one. But if you find some aspect of the situation your in confusing, maybe this will provide some clarity. Or at least some techniques for finding clarity soon.

My final suggestion is that you buy the book and skim it. Try and find sections that apply to the startup you're in (or are thinking of building). Make a note of the stuff that doesn't seem to make sense. Then put it on your shelf and forget about it. If your experience is anything like mine, here's what will happen. One day, you'll be banging your head against the wall, trying to make progress on some seemingly intractable problem (like, how the hell do I know if this random customer is an early adopter who I should spend time listening to, or a mainstream customer who won't buy my product for years). That's when I would get that light bulb moment: this problem sounds familiar. Go to your shelf. Get down the book, and be amazed that you are not the first person to tackle this problem in the history of the world.

I have been continually surprised at how many times I could go back to that same well for wisdom and advice. I hope you will be too.

Every once in awhile you come across a book that changes how you live your life or in this case how you start and operate a company. For years people have talked about "Crossing the Chasm" as the book to read if you are building a company. What you didn't realize is that it takes a few years of hard work to get your company ready to cross the chasm. Well if you are looking for the book that provides the roadmap to the chasm, then this is the book.

What is amazing about this book is how it takes you step by step thru how to actually figure out the right product and market for you startup. It has actual steps to follow, something many books lack.

On the down side, the book needs a good edit as it seems to be a companion to the author's course at Berkeley.

All in all, if you got one idea that saves you making a mistake in the early days of your startup, this book is worth it.

I heard Steve Blank talk in Silicon Valley and bought the book. The good news; this book is a real eyeopener. If you have ever done a startup, failed, and never understood what went wrong, here is a clear insight of what breaks in early stage high tech ventures. And tons of concrete suggestions of how to fix it. The bad news; don't expect a polished book. This is essentially Steve's Berkeley and Columbia class notes for his business school classes.

I had high hopes for this book. I have listened to the author speak, and while I disagreed with some of his hypotheses (such as startups don't need QA), he brings valuable experiences to his view on startups.

Since I am a direct target of the book (CEO of a startup), I was hoping that I would walk away with as many sparks as I did from reading the Innovator's Dilemma. Unfortunately, I found the book, for me at least, often struggled with getting the point across.

This book raises some very good points about the downfalls of waterfall process, and how the Agile processes for engineering apply equally or more so to marketing and sales. There are some excellent points throughout about how the CEO and other key execs need to validate the market and pivot in order to get to success.

But, there is certain snarkiness to the book that detracts, and I often felt that the material was extremely wordy. I didn't get to "aha" moments along the way. I often judge management books by how many pages I mark to follow up on, and whether I want my team to read the book. In this case, I marked two pages for follow up, but can't recommend it to my team.

There are some important pieces of information, but it is so much work to get to them.

The book is at its best when it is going through case studies, showing organizations that survived or failed, and missteps they made along the way. I wish the book had far more of such case studies in it, since for me at least, I found them much more valuable for showcasing the ideas.

I first heard about this book from a potential investor and immediately ordered it on his recommendation. This book is FANTASTIC. It creates a step-by-step process for determining if your business "vision" is really a "hallucination." You might be successful without reading this book, but your odds will increase if you do. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. Ignore it at your peril.

If you are starting a company and have never done so before, don't bother with this book. It will all sound completely obvious and you will think you know it all. However, if you've tried to build a company or two and failed (or even succeeded) this book is the bible. Experienced entreprenuers will literally be slapping their foreheads and saying "duh" as they read the chapter by chapter stories and recognize almost every mistake they made. The Customer Development methodology is the first place I've ever seen the wisdom of experienced investors and startup CEO's distilled into something readable, repeatable and actionable. Buy this book and increase your odds of getting it right.

The reasons it's great:

Takes product decisions out of the realm of "my vision is better than your vision" into the realm of "the facts say we should prioritize this way..."

Helps a startup discover its CORE value proposition, forcing it to iterate until it has paying customers clamoring for the product.

Emphasizes a low-burn experimentation model rather than a high-burn product milestone focused model.

Helps all of the employees of a company get a visceral sense for what it will take to achieve early traction.

Has been proven to work in both B2B and B2C


Disclosure: I've (gladly) worked with Steve at his courses at Stanford and Berkeley

This book gives a systematic and step-by-step roadmap on how to discover and cultivate paying customers - arguably the most important thing for a startup. The Customer Discovery process discussed n this book is quite different from the traditional Product Development process, or the sales process used by established companies. But the Customer Discovery process distills the author's years of successful entrepreneurial experience, and most likely will work better than alternatives in real life startup environments.

A few typos notwithstanding, this is definitely a worthwhile reading for any aspiring entrepreneurs, especially if the company is a B2B startup.

The Good:

The content of this book is of incredibly high quality. Having gone through the process of building a couple companies I found myself nodding in agreement frequently and often because the author articulated something I had felt and understood but not yet found a way to clearly communicate. There are some really great quotes and advice in this thing and as you progress through the pages the entire content is just solid and I could not recommend it enough. This really should be required reading for entrepreneurs starting companies as it clearly states issues and problems that otherwise require a lot of hard work and pain to discover.

The Bad:

There is a lot of repetition and much of the book is long winded. There are some chapters and sections
that could have been significantly reduced without losing any value. That said, there is enough meat that this can be overlooked.

The production quality of this book is perhaps the worst I have ever seen (especially considering it cost $40). It reads as though it had no proofreader with glaring typos, word omissions, and grammatical mistakes occurring with distracting frequency. I counted 7 glaring mistakes in the first 30 pages and that rough pace is maintained throughout the book. Additionally the quality of the printing is quite poor with bad alignments, varying margins, horrifically butchered charts and graphs (see pg 56 for a good example), and bulleted lists (the author uses these too much IMHO) appearing when I don't believe the content called for it at all.

I almost did not read this book because the production quality bothered me so much but I am glad I stuck with it. Once you get about 50 pages in it will be difficult to not read it through to conclusion.

This is an awesome book -- it provides a clear and concise roadmap to follow in order to launch a successful new company. It's easy to read and to follow and it contains the lessons learned from a lifetime of successful entrepreneurial activity. Blank teaches the content of this book to "standing room only" crowds at some of the best business schools in the world.