The Startup Owner's Manual

How to Read This Book

CLEARLY, THE STARTUP OWNER’S MANUAL IS not a novel. This book is a step-by-step how-to guide that details a process for building a successful, profitable, scalable startup. It has more in common with a car repair manual than it does with your favorite page-turner. Don’t attempt to read this book in a single sitting or long weekend. It will be your companion—and, we hope, your very best friend—for the six to 30 months or more that it often takes to begin building a successful, scalable startup business.

Organization

This book is organized in four distinct sections. The first, Getting Started, describes the Customer Development methodology and ends with the “Customer Development Manifesto,” a series of 14 guiding principles for startups deploying the Customer Development process.

Don’t read too much at a time.

The next section, Step One, “Customer Discovery," turns the founders’ vision into a business model canvas and then into a series of hypotheses. Those hypotheses are turned into experiments, and tested with customers to see if your understanding of the customer problem and proposed solution mesh.

Step Two, “Customer Validation," expands the scope of the business model testing to see if you can get enough orders or users to prove that you have a repeatable and scalable business model.

The fourth key section, found in Appendix A, is a series of Checklists that help you track your progress at every stage of the Customer Development process. Use the ...