When Bob Dorf and I wrote The Startup Owner's Manual we listed a series of Customer Development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here:
A Startup Is a Temporary Organization Designed to Search
for A Repeatable and Scalable Business Model
- There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside
- Pair Customer Development with Agile Development
- Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model
- If You're Afraid to Fail You're Destined to Do So
- Iterations and Pivots are Driven by Insight
- Validate Your Hypotheses with Experiments
- Success Begins with Buy-In from Investors and Co-Founders
- No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers
- Not All Startups Are Alike
- Startup Metrics are Different from Existing Companies
- Agree on Market Type - It Changes Everything
- Fast, Fearless Decision-Making, Cycle Time, Speed and Tempo
- If it's not About Passion, You're Dead the Day You Opened your Doors
- Startup Titles and Functions Are Very Different from a Company's
- Preserve Cash While Searching. After It's Found, Spend
- Communicate and Share Learning
- Startups Demand Comfort with Chaos and Uncertainty
Quite a few people have asked for a way to remember these without having to dig through the book. So by popular demand, here's a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto. You can order a copy here.
Nail it to your wall.
Steve Blank's blog: www.steveblank.com