What it argues
Steve Blank wrote The Four Steps to the Epiphany after watching hundreds of startups fail the same way: they built products based on untested assumptions, then discovered too late that no one wanted them. His answer is customer development, a parallel process to product development that forces founders to treat their business model as a hypothesis and their early customers as a source of data rather than a revenue stream.
The four steps are customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation, and company building. The first two are about finding a repeatable and scalable business model. Customer discovery means getting out of the building — literally — to understand whether the problem the startup is solving is real and painful enough to pay for. Customer validation tests whether a sales process can be constructed around whatever the founders learned. Together these two steps define whether a startup has found product-market fit. Customer creation and company building come after, not before.
What it gets right
- 1.
Most startups fail not because they can't build the product but because they build the wrong product. Customer development exists to catch that mistake early.
- 2.
A startup is not a small version of a big company. It's a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model.
- 3.
Get out of the building. Founders' assumptions about customers are almost always wrong. The only way to test them is to talk to real people before building.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and academic who founded or co-founded eight companies over twenty years, including E.piphany. He now teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Columbia, and is credited with developing the customer development methodology that underpins the lean startup movement. His work influenced Eric Ries's The Lean Startup. He blogs prolifically at steveblank.com and continues to advise startups and government organizations on applying scientific thinking to new venture creation.
