The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Introduction

Think Different

— Steve Jobs

When I wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany over a decade ago, I had no idea I would be starting the Lean Startup revolution. Newly retired, with time to reflect on what I had learned from my 21 years as an entrepreneur, I was struggling to reconcile the reality of my experience with the then-common advice about how to start a company. Investors, VCs and educators all taught entrepreneurs to use the same process used in an established company. To be successful, you wrote a plan, raised money and then executed to the plan, all in a very linear direction.

My experience suggested that they were all wrong.

I spent several years working through a different approach to building startups. This became the Customer Development process and the idea of Market Types. In hindsight, I now realize that while educators and startup investors had adapted tools and processes useful for executing a business model, there were no tools and processes to search for a business model. It seemed obvious to me that searching is what startups actually do, but it was a pretty lonely couple of years convincing others.

Over time necessity – not investors or educators – drove the adoption of the Customer Development process. The emerging web, mobile and cloud apps, built with small teams already using agile development, needed a much faster process to acquire customer feedback. This new generation of entrepreneurs were rapid early adopters of customer development as ...