The Startup Owner's Manual. Steve Blank

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СКАЧАТЬ of hindsight, entrepreneurs now understand the problem, namely that startups are not simply smaller versions of large companies. Companies execute business models where customers, their problems, and necessary product features are all “knowns.” In sharp contrast, startups operate in “search” mode, seeking a repeatable and profitable business model. The search for a business model requires dramatically different rules, roadmaps, skill sets, and tools in order to minimize risk and optimize chances for success.

      By the beginning of the 21^st century, entrepreneurs, led by web and mobile startups, began to seek and develop their own management tools. Now, a decade later, a radically different set of startup tools has emerged, distinct from those used in large companies but as comprehensive as the traditional “MBA Handbook.” The result is the emerging “science of entrepreneurial management.” My first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, was one of its first texts. It recognized that the classic books about large-company management were ill-suited for early-stage ventures. It offered a reexamination of the existing product-introduction process and delineated a radically different method that brings customers and their needs headfirst into the process long before the launch.

      We are building the first management tools specifically for startups.

      At the time I wrote it, the book was my proposed methodology for getting startups right. But just as it was published, agile engineering became the preferred product-development method. This iterative and incremental method created a need and a demand for a parallel process to provide rapid and continual customer feedback. The Customer Development process I articulated in The Four Steps fit that need perfectly.

Over the past decade, thousands of scientists, engineers and MBAs in my classes at Stanford’s engineering school and U.C. Berkeley’s Haas School of Business—plus those sponsored by the National Science Foundation—have discussed, deployed, assessed and enhanced the Customer Development process. It has since been implemented by tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors worldwide.

      While the fundamental, powerful “Four Steps” remain at its core, this book is far more than a second edition. Nearly every step in the process, and in fact the entire approach, have been enhanced and refined based on a decade of Customer Development experience.

      Customer development is paired with agile product development.

      Even more gratifying: now, a decade later, multiple books and authors, are filling shelves in the newly created section for the strategy and science of entrepreneurship. Some of the other areas in this emerging field of entrepreneurial management are:

       agile development, an incremental and interactive approach to engineering that enables product or service development to iterate and pivot to customer and market feedback

       business model design, which replaces static business plans with a nine-box map of the key elements that make up a company

       creativity and innovation tools for creating and fostering winning ideas

       the Lean Startup, an intersection of customer and agile development

       lean user interface design to improve web/mobile interfaces and conversion rates

       venture and entrepreneurial finance, to attract and manage funds that fuel the innovation

No one book, including this one, offers a complete roadmap or all the answers for entrepreneurs. Yet together, the texts in the entrepreneurial management science library offer entrepreneurs guidance where none existed before. Startups, driven by potential markets measured in billions of people, will use this body of knowledge to test, refine and scale their ideas far faster and more affordably than ever.

      No one book, including this one, offers a complete roadmap…

      My co-author Bob and I hope books like this one help speed the startup revolution and enhance its success—and yours.

      Steve Blank

      Pescadero, Calif., March 2012

Who Is This Book For?

      THIS BOOK IS FOR ALL ENTREPRENEURS and uses the term startup literally hundreds of times. But what exactly is a startup? A startup is not a smaller version of a large company. A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model. At the outset, the startup business model is a canvas covered with ideas and guesses, but it has no customers and minimal customer knowledge.

      But we’ve only defined the words startup, entrepreneur, and innovation halfway. These words mean different things in Silicon Valley, on Main Street, and in Corporate America. While each type of startup is distinct, this book offers guidance for each one.

      A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model.

      Small Business Entrepreneurship: In the United States, the majority of entrepreneurs and startups are found among 5.9 million small businesses that make up 99.7 percent of all U.S. companies and employ 50 percent of all nongovernment workers. These are often service-oriented businesses like drycleaners, gas stations and convenience stores, where entrepreneurs define success as paying the owners well and making a profit, and they seldom aspire to take over an industry or build a $100 million business.

Scalable startups are the work of traditional technology entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs start a company believing their vision will change the world and result in a company with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in sales. The early days of a scalable startup are about the search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Scale requires external venture-capital investment in the tens of millions to fuel rapid expansion. Scalable startups tend to cluster in technology centers such as Silicon Valley, Shanghai, New York, Bangalore, and Israel and make up a small percentage of entrepreneurs, but their outsize return potential attracts almost all the risk capital (and press).

Figure i.0 Scalable Startup

      “Buyable” startups are a new phenomenon. With the extremely low cost of developing web/mobile apps, startups can literally fund themselves on founders’ credit cards and raise small amounts of risk capital, usually less than $1 million. These startups (and their investors) are happy to be acquired for $5 million to $50 million, purchased by larger companies often to acquire the talent as much as the business itself.

Large Company Entrepreneurship: Large companies have finite life cycles. Most grow by offering new products that are variants of their core products (an approach known as sustaining innovation). They may also turn to disruptive innovation, attempting to introduce new products into new markets with new customers. Ironically, large companies’ size and culture make disruptive innovation (really an effort to launch a scalable startup inside a big company) extremely difficult to execute.

      …large companies’ size and culture make disruptive innovation extremely difficult.

      Social entrepreneurs build innovative nonprofits to change the world. Customer Development provides them a scorecard for assessing scalability, asset leverage, return on investment and growth metrics. These entrepreneurial ventures seek solutions rather than profits and happen on every continent in areas as diverse as water, agriculture, health, and microfinance.

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