The Startup Owner's Manual

Customer Development is damn hard work. You can’t fake it. You can’t just do the slides or “do” the process in a weekend. It’s a full-time, full-body-contact sport. It’s a long-term commitment to changing the way a startup is built. But it’s also proven to increase the chances of startup success.

It offered a reexamination of the existing product-introduction process and delineated a radically different method that brings customers and their needs headfirst into the process long before the launch.

Business Plan is a document written by existing companies to describe and launch follow-on or adjacent market products. It was mistakenly used for startups for decades until it was realized that no business plan survives first contact with customers.

The initial product specification comes from the founders’ vision, not the sum of a set of focus groups.

The fear of making a move before the last detail is nailed down is one of the biggest problems existing companies have when they need to learn how to search.

Unlike existing companies that fire executives when they fail to match a plan, we keep the founders and change the model.

In large companies, the mistakes just have additional zeros in them.

measuring progress against a product launch or revenue plan is simply false progress

Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime.

Today, after half a century of practice, we know unequivocally that the traditional MBA curriculum for running large companies like IBM, GM and Boeing does not work in startups. In fact, it’s toxic.