Lean Customer Development

Foreword

Steve Blank’s ideas are so well known today that some may not realize that when he first self-published The Four Steps to the Epiphany, he was very much a voice in the wilderness. Steve, with whom I’ve been fortunate to work as an investor, mentor, and friend, was courageous enough to call for bringing the rigorous approach of product development to the business and marketing functions of startups—long before mainstream entrepreneurs and VCs caught on; in so doing, he inspired many of us to rethink our beliefs about startups. He called that theory Customer Development.

Now that these ideas have taken hold well beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and become an integral part of the Lean Startup movement, it’s high time to revisit them and share some of the success stories, tips, and tricks from the trenches. It’s fitting that Cindy Alvarez, an early Lean Startup evangelist, has drawn upon her experience at early-stage startups and Fortune 500s alike—most recently, for Microsoft as Director of User Experience at Yammer—to write a nuts-and-bolts guide for a new generation of entrepreneurs.

The word “entrepreneur” may bring to mind the image of college kids working on some new technology in a garage, but my meaning is a little different. A startup includes any human enterprise designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty, and an entrepreneur is anyone tasked with ushering in that change. Whether they’re building a company in their garage, working ...