The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany Paperback – July 29, 2010

I highly recommend this book to anyone starting a business or interested in knowing more about what it takes. It is well written. and is easily read on the bus, between meetings or otherwise.- Will this book guarantee your success or lead to untold riches? -Seriously?! This is not a self-help infomercial. There are no guarantees in starting a business. If you wanted a guarantee, you'd be working a normal job. If you are serious about launching your own startup and you recognize the importance of finding and developing customers at the outset, this book will put you in the right frame of mind, and will give you some actionable tools to build a product that people (read: people you don't already know) want.- Isn't the Internet littered with free resources for this stuff? -It's true, there is no shortage of free articles or blog posts on the web with quips on customer discovery & development, but A) it takes time to find them, and I have yet to see any startup with "excess" time, and B) customers are the most important asset of any business, so learning how to find and develop your biggest asset should merit more than reading anecdotes online. The book provides a great roadmap, as well as some actionable exercises to make your efforts that much more effective. Buy it. Read it. You'll be thankful later.

First of all, this is NOT, as the title claims, a cheat sheet to The Four Steps of the Epiphany.Right in the book, on page 21, the authors state that this book focuses on the first step only (Customer Discovery). And I quote: "Future books will attempt to tackle other portions of the Customer Development process - believe us when we say that Customer Discovery is more than enough to 'bite off' at one time."I am docking the book one star for this. The authors should know better.Okay, now for the real question - Is this book worth getting, or should you just get Blank's original?Get them both. Read Blank's first, then read this one and use it to update the notes you took from Blank's book. They work well together but I would not just get this one, as you only get a small piece of the whole picture (per the authors' own admission).It's worth $30 if you actually use it, but don't assume it's a shortcut to Blank's book. It's only 1/4 of a shortcut.

Went into reading this book with a vague idea what Customer Development was, and now feel I have a pretty firm grasp on the concepts and the terminology. One of the most important takeaways for me, as a product manager, is to test all of my assumptions. This doesnt just apply to the major tenants of a business model for a startup. It could be a new feature you are launching. You think you know what value it will provide and that users will adopt for reasons x, y and z, but you dont know until to test. Challenge your assumptions! Love it.Would definitely recommend to other product professionals, or entrepreneurs looking to validate their ideas.

Like anything, being an entrepreneur is a solitary journey. As a successful entrepreneur, I found many of the steps over explained and too simple for someone already in the field, but I would recommend it to people who are starting out.

Other reviewers don't understand evidenced-based entrepreneurship. It is the new way to build a business that doubles a person's chance for success. At its core is the customer development (CD) method developed by Steve Blank out of Silicon Valley. Trouble is CD is not easy to grasp, and this one book helps tremendously. All depends on finding the right prospect and interviewing them correctly. Cooper's book does that well. His Chapter 8, "8 Steps to Customer Discovery", is gold. How to find prospects, how to reach out (interview) prospects, and the problem solving fit. Don't be critical o such a valuable book to lean startup followers. Clinton E. Day, MBA, entrepreneurship professor/author.

I'm using this book as a Guide for my startup Yesware [...]and it's been a great touchstone. I read through it in a morning, and now it sits, heavily annotated, on my desk for quick reference.It's a great book if you:* Are starting a business right now* Are running a P&L in a larger company* Are studying current trends in entrepreneurial thinkingThis Guide effectively gathers and summarizes the concepts of the leading actors in the Customer Development/Lean Startup school of running a business. Before this, there was one self-published book on the topic and hundreds of excellent but hard to find blog posts scattered around the web. So it's fantastic to have the main themes of CD gathered authoritatively in one short book.The Guide doesn't advance the discussion significantly, and it lacks some of the analytical models that are available on line, but it's clearly written, thoughtfully organized and definitely worth your time.

This book is an excellent tool to put in your Customer Development arsenal. I found it a valuable companion to The Four Steps to the Epiphany as it boils down many of the core processes outlined therein. The Customer Development process is intense and time-consuming, and learning the core concepts should't require reading a 500 page textbook. This short form resource makes it easier to learn and discuss CD as it relates to your business. I also recommend this book as part of the Customer Development education process as it's much more accessible and easier to digest than The Four Steps. Get a couple copies of The Four Steps and several copies of this book for your team.