The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Беря на чтение эту книгу, я не ожидал, что будет достаточно тяжело читать ее и не потому, что язык автора такой. (Хотя это конечно же бизнес книга со своим языком, но для такой литературы автор более чем пишет легко.) А потому, что автор досконально раскладывает весь процесс организации стартапа, продвижения и его продаж и в книге очень много деталей, которые легко пропустить. Это пошаговая инструкция и поэтому прочитав скопом многое можно не понять, надо обязательно перечитывать, ну если конечно вы собираетесь использовать идеи автора в своем стартапе. Автор раскладывает каждый этап в развитии стартапа, на несколько шагов, которые еще на несколько. При этом в книге много схем и таблиц иллюстрирующих и помогающих понять мысль автора. В конце разбора каждого этапа есть обобщающая таблица – краткое изложение этапа. Почти 20% книги — это Приложения для стартапов, разбором как формировать команды и контрольным списком вопросов, которые помогут разобрать предложенную автором методологию и процесс развития потребителей. Книга будет интересна и полезна в основном тем, кто работает в стартапах или создает их, а также инвесторам, которые хотят вложиться в стартапы. Особенно подойдет книга для IT-стартапов и высокотехнологичных стартапов.

Way too thorough and detailed for being applicable to real life as is, but full of inspirational and revolutionary ideas nonetheless.

Book suggests all innovative startups to follow the framework:

1. Discover your customers first — build prototypes, go to the field, talk to people, hear people. Don't go to the next step until you find real people with real pain your product solves.

The proof of realness is only money which earlyvangelists are ready to pay to you.

2. Validate your customers — find more new customers to prove with $ that you found the distribution chanel, profitable and repeatable marketing and sales strategies for your product.

If not (no matter how many hypothethes you've tried) — go to step #1 and start over again.

3. Grow your customers to win the most of them.

Now that you have scalable sales strategy, proven deman for your product, it's time to hire sales people, marketing department, PR agency and go for winning the market.

Your goal is to repeat process of testing different ideas to find your niche, your positioning, distribution, marketing etc.

Repeat until you found and measured the way to stay on market and grow.

Either you're building a new market and your strategy should be based on educating the customers, on delivering good enough and innovative product.

Or you're trying to resegment existing market and win the leaders with niche strategy...

Anyway your goal is to cross tha chasm between early adopters and mainstream customers.

Until you do, you don't go to the next step.

4. Build your company.

Once you feel good on the market you're finally set to spend a big buck on creating a business.

To create a business you have to move from agile passionate 24/7 startup mindset to mission and process oriented mentality. And build structured and easily managable organization accordingly.

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Basic mantra of the book — do not take anything for granted, everything you think of the world (market, customers, product etc.) ara just hypotheses. Each hypothesis should be verified by experiment.

The cheaper experiments you can arrange and prioritize according to you specific sutiation (market type, type of product, competitors etc.), the higher your chances of success.

Most experiments could be made for cheap, and you should keep budget low until you actually see that a market needs your product.

As opposed to old-school way where company burns tons of investors' cash trying to stick to unrealistic expectations, wasting time building huge product and prematurely growing its "bubble", before it checked wether somebody would really buy the product.