Home > Work > The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
1 " Rule No. 5: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers So Use a Business Model Canvas "
― Steve Blank , The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
2 " Rule No. 1: There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside. "
3 " Start by asking yourself, “What insight do I need to move forward?” Then ask, “What’s the simplest test I can run to get it?” Finally, think about, “How do I design an experiment to run this simple test?” One "
4 " A business model describes the flow between key components of the company: • value proposition, which the company offers (product/service, benefits) • customer segments, such as users, and payers, or moms or teens • distribution channels to reach customers and offer them the value proposition • customer relationships to create demand • revenue streams generated by the value proposition(s) • resources needed to make the business model possible • activities necessary to implement the business model • partners who participate in the business and their motivations for doing so • cost structure resulting from the business model The "
5 " When a web/mobile startup plans to first focus on amassing huge numbers of users, eyeballs, or clicks and to “figure out the revenue model later,” this implies a multi-sided market. "
6 " Entrepreneurs often mistake their business plan as a cookbook for execution, failing to recognize that it is only a collection of unproven assumptions. At its back, a revenue plan blessed by an investor, and composed overwhelmingly of guesses, suddenly becomes an operating plan driving hiring, firing, and spending. Insanity. "
7 " Market type influences everything a company does. "
8 " Rule No. 6: Design Experiments and Test to Validate Your Hypotheses "
9 " Remember, the goal of customer discovery is to refine a business model enough to test it on a larger scale in the next step, customer validation. So "
10 " Rule No. 5: No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers So Use a Business Model Canvas There’s only one reason for a business plan: some investor who went to business school doesn’t know any better and wants to see one. "
11 " Develop a Reference Story "
12 " Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. —Friedrich Nietzsche "
13 " The best introduction to a prospect is through a peer. "
14 " In a startup, the founders define the product vision and then use customer discovery to find customers and a market for that vision. "
15 " the goal at this stage is not U/I perfection. It is to test a problem. It could be done with a sock-puppet if the test were set up correctly. "
16 " Customer Development experiments are short, simple, objective pass/fail tests. You’re looking for a strong signal in the signal/noise noise ratio, something like five of the first 12 customers you call on saying “I need this right now, even if it’s still buggy.” Early tests aren’t necessarily precise, but should give you a “good enough” signal to proceed. "
17 " turn those hypotheses into facts by getting out of the building and testing them in front of customers. "
18 " Start with 50 Target Customers "
19 " Winners throw out the traditional product management and introduction processes they learned at existing companies. Instead, they combine agile engineering and Customer Development to iteratively build, test and search for a business model, turning unknowns into knowns. Winners also recognize their startup “vision” as a series of untested hypotheses in need of “customer proof.” They relentlessly test for insights, and they course-correct in days or weeks, not months or years, to preserve cash and eliminate time wasted on building features and products that customers don’t want. "
20 " Rule No. 2: Pair Customer Development with Agile Development Customer Development is useless unless the product development organization can iterate the product with speed and agility. "
