A Book to Accompany You on Your Entrepreneurial Journey!

The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

Two immensely experienced and knowledgeable authors share their views and give you a very hands-on book to work with:

Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur and now teacher of Customer Development and entrepreneurship at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School and Columbia University

and

Bob Dorf, also a serial entrepreneur and the owner of K&S Ranch consultancy. He also teaches a course at Columbia Business School on Customer Development and getting startups right.

The book is meant to be used as its name says: a manual that accompanies you during your search for the right business model and setting your foot out to develop your customer base.

The authors organized it in four segments:

Section 1: Getting Started

A description of Customer development methodology and giving you guiding principles for deploying your own Customer development process.

Section 2: Step One “Customer Discovery”

The entrepreneur’s vision will be turned into a business model canvas and into a line of hypotheses, which will be the basis for customer testing to see if the solution you offer is of any value to the customers.

Section 3: Step Two “Customer Validation”

This step takes the testing further to find out if you can get enough orders for your product or service to verify that your business model is repeatable and scalable.

Section 4:

You find a bunch of checklists for you and your entire team to document all steps you are taking and to make sure to have not skipped any important tasks.

We really like the author’s major recommendation:

“We see a direct correlation between the entrepreneurs’ success and the degree to which their copy (of the book) is dog-eared, beat up and tattered.”

Our recommendation:

Go get the book whether you are just starting out or already on your way!