Product Description The essential "how to" book for anyone bringing a product to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development for a new product or company. The book offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success. [ ^Top ]
Required Reading for TECH Startups
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I am currently working on my first startup and was looking for resources to guide me. I ordered this book based on it being on several entrepreneur's reading lists and am happy to say that it was worth the wait (I waited several weeks as I am in Asia).
The outlined customer development process is very methodical with a lot of meat (unlike other start up books which focus more on high level principles) with a workbook section that you can work through in a checklist fashion.
One of the key aspects of this book is getting in touch with customers to validate/update your hyphotheses, which will prove to be the bane of every shy founder!! Fortunately for me, I already have a list of potential customers to approach, which will save me having to do cold calling!
My (minor) gripes are the shocking editing and the amateurish print quality.Furthermore, like an earlier reviewer said, its not an easy read and at times I felt like I was reading a textbook. Nonetheless I am awarding it 5 stars based on the outstanding content.
I highly recommend this book, along with Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start, Founder's at Work and 37Signal's Getting Real to aid you in your journey.
Very Practical View of Startups
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* I've been looking for a startup manual that matches my experiences for a long time. This is it!
* Note that this book is not an easy read. It is more of a manual.
* I've been using this book as the main text in a course this past month with good results.
- A big "Thank You" to the author for supporting me
Key Concepts that I really like are.
1) Your "product/idea/customers/model" is all a hypothesis at the beginning.
* It is not fact.
* The sooner you "get out of the building", test it out & iterate it, the better.
2) Customer Discovery Rules
* "Facts are outside the building, opinions are inside."
* "Solve a problem that customers say is important and valuable"
* "Does the product concept solve that problem"
Great Stuff.
Amazing Framework for a Startup
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This book is a must have for startups. I have been using it to develop a framework for my startup and find it vital to my current success. I highly recommend this book.
My most dog eared business book
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Steven Blank has done an incredible job of demystifying the market demand creation process. The book itself is a step by step guide on all the stages required for a successful product launch. Blank takes you from the early R&D stages to positioning.
Even though when I first read the book we were at the later stages of the process, this was helpful to fill in some gaps and to refocus on what is important.
A Must Have for the Serious Entrepreneur
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This book is a must-read for all entrepreneurs who are serious about making their venture successful. Steve Blank, an accomplished serial entrepreneur, provides a rigorous process, supported with details and examples, for discovering and validating early customers, creating customer demand and ultimately building a successful business. His process parallels and complements the much-accepted, engineering-driven Product Development Process, used by most VC-backed Silicon Valley startups. Blank's process focuses on where the highest startup risks usually lie - that is, the risks of having few or no customers by the time the product is ready for prime time. His process is structured with early customer testing activities and milestones, all aimed at intimately understanding the customer needs early on and ultimately ensuring that the product gets customer traction by the time it's ready to ship.
This book is extremely valuable because it provides a structured approach for understanding your most important early adopter customers, and then feed this customer intelligence into the Product Development Process. I wholeheartedly recommend it to both aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs.
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