Professor Steve Blank has helped found more than 10,000 new businesses through his ability to systematize the creation of startups. The whole lean startup movement has its origins in Steve Blank's Stanford classes. This knowledge is synthesized in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, and he has made the book one of the most influential guides to entrepreneurship. For Blank, a startup is completely different from an established company. While the established company runs a business model, the challenge of a startup is to find this business model to run. In this book, Blank helps entrepreneurs discover their problems before they have big costs.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany Successful Strategies for Products that Win Steven G. Blank Second Edition.
Quick iterations, customer feedback and testing ideas early. These are some of the things you will learn here. This book is essential for anyone who is going to start something new. Have a good time! A Startup Is Not a Miniature Of a Great Company Traditional knowledge tells us that companies are similar and that best management practices should be adopted by all companies. However, when you are starting a new business, a startup, the same rules of the corporate world do not apply.
Unlike large companies, startups need to find their customers and prove that their vision is workable. If they fail to achieve this goal, they die. Although most people believe that startups are only small versions of large companies, this understanding ends up hurting the entrepreneur, and many mistakes are made by believing in popular wisdom. Big companies have great resources and can launch new products into mass markets, while startups are not able to go down this road.
A startup can not afford to use the processes of launching new products from large companies, after all, large companies already have a large customer base and know their competitors well. Nokia 5233 video song free download full. So to create new products they use a different process: first they design the product and then find customers to buy it. Startups do not understand their market, they do not count on customers, and so they must first know their potential customers and then develop a new product. The process adopted by successful startups is the reverse.
They first build a customer base and then create a suitable product. When a startup focuses on developing a product without understanding its customers, big mistakes and problems can occur. An interesting example is the case of the Segway, equipment that was developed with one principle in mind: people do not want to walk and need a personal vehicle. All the people who walk are our potential clients. That caused the company to invest more than 200 million dollars in a product that did not obtain commercial success, and until today it looks for its real applications in the market.
Most of the time, a founder of a startup does not know their market as established companies. He has a vision he believes in, but his main challenge is to prove it. For this, it is necessary to go through a long journey of uncertainties, challenges, and learning. During this journey, he needs to overcome these challenges and find out who his potential customers are, how the market works, and then build a large company. The first step in this journey is to define a set of core values and a clear long-term mission to guide you on your journey.
Almost all startups go through challenging periods in their early stages, and it is during this period that mission statement will be vital in showing the way forward. But while fundamental values never change, the mission statement can change over time with new product launches, for example. Understanding How New Technologies Are Adopted If the model stated that the product was first to be built and then sold through marketing and sales strategies in the 1990s, that model began to be questioned. Everett Rogers, for example, created the technology adoption curve that shows how people embrace innovations in their everyday lives. According to Rogers, technology is adopted in phases by five different groups: Enthusiastic, visionary, pragmatic, conservative and skeptical. The first two groups, the enthusiasts, and the visionaries are the initial market.
The next two groups, the pragmatic and conservative, are the mass market. The adoption of a product by the market has the shape of a bell curve, where the first groups begin to adopt a technology slowly and gradually grows into the mass market. There is a chasm between the different groups, and the hardest thing to beat is getting out of the initial users to go to the mass market. These chasms exist because of the different needs and consumption habits of each of the groups. The main challenge to getting across this chasm is that the marketing and sales lessons learned from early markets may not be useful in the mass market and this may call for major changes in the models of clients'attraction and technologies' adoption. Many startups focus on finding ways to overcome the chasm and create a mass product. But that's the wrong approach.