The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win Paperback – July 17, 2013

If you were to interview entrepreneurial high-tech CEO's having just sold their companies, or less than successful CEO's who wound them up, they would provide a great source of information; however their reflections could sound like Tiger Woods at his recent press conference, "Regrets, I've had a few....too few...I mean too many to mention".Underachievement of potential is an opinion many investors will have reached on exiting their high-tech investment. In a conversation with Nic Brisbourne, investment partner at Esprit Capital Ventures in London last week, we concluded that the principal factors causing underachievement are generally people, not product related and the root cause is nearly always poor sales and marketing execution.In hindsight CEO's will generally agree that they should have made changes earlier and knowing what they know now, can tell you what they would have done differently.But what if entrepreneurs had a method or set of best-practices that were proven to create early sales and marketing success in both startups and new product introductions in high-tech companies...would this change the odds of survival and over/underachievement and the value of the company on exit?I believe it would and am currently reading and absorbing the wisdom and four steps cover knowledge captured in Steven Gary Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany", subtitled "successful strategies for products that win", a book about building successful high-tech companies.Blank is better known in the US than in Europe, having started 8 companies in CEO or Marketing roles, five of which were IPO's including names you may remember: E.piphany an enterprise software company, Ardent a Supercomputer company, two semiconductor companies MIPS Computers and Zilog and according to Blank 3 very deep craters.Blank teaches entrepreneurship and Customer Development at UC Berkeley's Haas Business School, in the Colombia/Berkeley MBA program and at Stanford University at the Graduate School of Engineering.I love this book!; it's the best advice I have ever read in one volume for entrepreneurs. So many times through this book I said aloud, "wow if i'd only known this back then.....Blank's core thesis in building companies is that there are four discrete stages in the process:4 steps to the epiphany1.Customer Discovery - is about finding out if there are customers for your idea and if and what they would be willing to pay for it, before you write a line of code. This must be done by leaving the office and talking to real potential customers and of course this removes the guess work in initial product specification - as the spec. is the founders vision and the mimimum working set required to win first customers (or earlyvangelists as Blank calls them). Customer Discovery removes pricing risk because prospects tell you what they would be prepared to pay and it removes the hiring and market failure risk of alternate approaches, including the popular "build it and they will come" start-up strategy.2.Customer Validation creates a repeatable sales and marketing road-map based on the lessons learned in selling (not giving it away) to the first early customers. These first two steps validate the assumptions in your business model, that a market exists for your product, who your customers will be, the target buyers, establishes pricing, sales process and channels strategy.3. Customer Creation builds on early sales success and after completion of Customer Validation. Blank states that customer creation is dependent on the market entry type which is governed by the nature of the product - is it a disruptive innovation or a me-too. Customer Creation strategies define the four types of start-up* Startups entering an existing market* Startups that are creating an entirely new market* Startups wanting to resegment an existing market as a low cost entrant* Startups that want to resegment an existing market as a niche player4. Company Building is where the company transitions from its informal learning and discoveryoriented Customer Development team into formal sales, marketing and business development teams to exploit the company's early success.If you are an entrepreneur or a sales, marketing or business development leader responsible for introducing new products or services, then this book is a must read.

The book is good and interesting. Steve gets all his experience on the table, and makes a wonderful case for "Customer development" and "Product development" going in parallel. I have been through a launch of a product, and much of what he mentions in the book have also been my reasons for failure - and that's truly insightful! Many of the situations in the book has had happened in my case - primarily because we've been majorly "product development"- centric and worked on "customer development" after the product had reached the MVP state - when we figured out that things don't work the way customers like.Also, the examples and case-studies in the book are very nice. Some of them, I can already identify with (Eg: SUN's great start), and many I knew not - but still very apt. Postmortem on failures is a very nice way of explaining way to succeed, and Steve does a good job at it!Some parts of the book becomes a little monotonous to read. I see some repetitions, and some very obscure text. I could actually skip some pages in between, and still get a gist of the chapters. This is the reason for 4/5 stars.What I would also appreciate is some stories on "success" stories of startups whose founders have read this book, and have actually applied the methods explained in there. Such stories adds that extra supportive information, and first-hand accounts of success based on this book. I believe future editions of this book might contain such stories...

Note: The review that follows is of the Third Edition, published in 2007.In this volume, Steven Gary Blank introduces and then explains in thorough detail the "Customer Development" model, one that he characterizes as "a paradox because it is followed by successful startups, yet has been articulated by no one [other than Blank, prior to its initial publication in 2005]. Its basic propositions are the antithesis of common wisdom yet they are followed by those who achieve success. It is the path that is hidden in plain sight." In fact, Blank insists that what he offers is a "better way to manage startups. Those that survive the first few tough years "do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers of the venture capital community." And this is also true of product launches in new divisions inside larger corporations or in the "canonical" garages.Moreover, "through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful [whatever their nature and origin] all invent a parallel process to Product Development. In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery. I call this process `Customer Development,' a sibling to `Product Development,' and each and every startup that succeeds recapitulates it, knowingly or not." Wow! This really is interesting stuff and I haven't even begun to read the first chapter.Few start ups succeed, most don't, and Blank notes that each new company or new product startup involves (borrowing from Joseph Campbell) a "hero's journey" that begins with an almost "mythological vision - a hope of what could be, with a goal few others can see. It is this bright and burning vision that differentiates the entrepreneur from big company CEOs and startups from existing businesses." Although Blank suggests that the aforementioned "journey" involves a four-step process, it should be noted that not one but several epiphanies or at least revelations can and - hopefully - will occur during that process, one that is multi-dimensional rather than linear, from Point A to Point Z.These are among the dozens of reader-friendly passages I found of greatest interest and value:o Customer Discovery Step-by-Step (Page 30)o The Customer Discovery Philosophy (33-37)o Customer Discovery Summary (76)o The Customer Validation Philosophy (82-83)o Customer Validation Summary (118)o Customer Creation Step-by-Step (120)o Customer Creation Philosophy (123-124)o The Four Building Blocks of Customer Creation (129-132)o Customer Creation Summary (157)o Company Building Step-by-Step (158)o The Company Building Philosophy (162-163)o Company Building Summary (205)No brief commentary such as mine can possibly do full justice to the scope and depth of material that Steven Gary Blank provides in this volume but I hope that I have at least suggested why I think so highly of him and his work. Also, I hope that those who read this commentary will be better prepared to determine whether or not they wish to read it and, in that event, will have at least some idea of how the information, insights, and wisdom could perhaps be of substantial benefit to them and to their own organization.