The Startup Owners Manual

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why? The Startup Owner's Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, co-creator with Eric Ries of the "Lean Startup" movement and tested and refined by him for more than a decade. This 608-page how-to guide includes over 100 charts, graphs, and diagrams, plus 77 valuable checklists that guide you as you drive your company toward profitability. It will help you: Avoid the 9 deadly sins that destroy startups' chances for success Use the Customer Development method to bring your business idea to life Incorporate the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses Identify your customers and determine how to "get, keep and grow" customers profitably Compute how you'll drive your startup to repeatable, scalable profits. The Startup Owners Manual was originally published by K&S Ranch Publishing Inc. and is now available from Wiley. The cover, design, and content are the same as the prior release and should not be considered a new or updated product.

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why? The Startup Owner's Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, co-creator with Eric Ries of the "Lean Startup" movement and tested and refined by him for more than a decade. This 608-page how-to guide includes over 100 charts, graphs, and diagrams, plus 77 valuable checklists that guide you as you drive your company toward profitability. It will help you: • Avoid the 9 deadly sins that destroy startups' chances for success • Use the Customer Development method to bring your business idea to life • Incorporate the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses • Identify your customers and determine how to "get, keep and grow" customers profitably • Compute how you'll drive your startup to repeatable, scalable profits. The Startup Owner's Manual was originally published by K&S Ranch Publishing Inc. and is now available from Wiley. The cover, design, and content are the same as the prior release and should not be considered a new or updated product.

A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

The non-technical guide to building a booming tech-enabled business Thinking of starting a technology-enabled business? Or maybe you just want to increase your technology mojo so you can do your job better? You do not need to learn programming to participate in the development of today’s hottest technologies. But there are a few easy-to-grasp foundation concepts that will help you engage with a technical team. Starting a Tech Business explains in practical, actionable terms how to formulate and reality test new ideas package what you learn into frameworks that are highly actionable for engineers understand key foundation concepts about modern software and systems participate in an agile/lean development team as the ‘voice of the customer’ Even if you have a desire to learn to program (and I highly recommend doing whatever unlocks your ‘inner tinkerer’), these foundation concepts will help you target what exactly you want to understand about hands-on technology development. While a decade ago the barriers to creating a technology-enabled business required a pole vault, getting started today only requires a determined step in the right direction. Starting a Tech Business supplies the tools prospective entrepreneurs and business enterprises need to avoid common pitfalls and succeed in the fast-paced world of high-tech business. Successful execution requires thoughtful, evidence-based product formulation, well-articulated design, economic use of systems, adaptive management of technical resources, and empathetic deployment to customers. Starting a Tech Business offers practical checklists and frameworks that business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals can apply to any tech-based business idea, whether you’re developing software and products or beginning a technology-enabled business. You’ll learn: 1. How to apply today’s leading management frameworks to a tech business 2. How to package your product idea in a way that’s highly actionable for your technical team 3. How to ask the right questions about technology selection and product architecture 4. Strategies to leverage what your technology ecosystem has to offer 5. How to carefully define the roles on your team, and then effectively evaluate candidates 6. The most common disconnects between engineers and business people and how to avoid them 7. How you can apply process design to your tech business without stifling creativity 8. The steps to avoid the most common pitfalls tech founders encounter Now is one of the best times to start a technology-enabled business, and anyone can do it with the right amount and kind of preparation. Starting a Tech Business shows you how to move a product idea to market quickly and inexpensively—and to tap into the stream of wealth that a tech business can provide.

Presents a framework for starting and building new businesses based on the authors' insight that "most startups fail because they didn't develop their market". Based on Steve Blank's 2005 book 'The four steps to the Epiphany', this non-fiction novella aims to help readers to develop customer development.

WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER Every business owner dreams of success, but the majority of businesses are doomed to fail. This book offers a journey through the pitfalls that cause 90% of companies to crash—and the crucial remedies entrepreneurs can use to avoid (or fix) them. Kim Hvidkjær was 29 years old when he became a millionaire. Two years later, after a cluster of disasters, he found himself basically broke. Now, having rebuilt his fortune as the founder of several successful enterprises and studied thousands of failed startups, Hvidkjær has become an expert in failure: what it means, what it looks like, and the strategies that business owners can use to prevent it. In How to F*ck Up Your Startup, he takes us on an entertaining and enlightening journey through the complex patterns of failure in the life cycle of a business, covering: Attitude mistakes Business model missteps Market research snafus Funding and financial blunders Product development errors Organization oversights Sales slip-ups Growing pains Most important, he tackles what to do when your business has gone wrong. Hvidkjær fleshes out a tangible, usable blueprint for entrepreneurs looking to learn (the easy way) from the mistakes of businesses gone before. Chock-full of easy-to-follow business lessons that will keep you from f*cking up your startup, this down-to-earth guide offers crucial, actionable advice for seasoned business owners and startup founders alike. A masterclass in failure, How to F*ck Up Your Startup is required reading for reaching success.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Number of teams that applied to Y Combinator’s summer 2011 batch: 2,089 Teams interviewed: 170 Minutes per interview: 10 Teams accepted and funded: 64 Months to build a viable startup: 3 Possibilities: BOUNDLESS Investment firm Y Combinator is the most sought-after home for startups in Silicon Valley. Twice a year, it funds dozens of just-founded startups and provides three months of guid­ance from Paul Graham, YC’s impresario, and his partners, also entrepreneurs and mostly YC alumni. The list of YC-funded success stories includes Dropbox (now valued at $5 billion) and Airbnb ($1.3 billion). Receiving an offer from YC creates the oppor­tunity of a lifetime — it’s like American Idol for budding entrepreneurs. Acclaimed journalist Randall Stross was granted unprecedented access to Y Combinator’s summer 2011 batch of young companies, offering a unique inside tour of the world of software startups. Most of the founders were male programmers in their mid-twenties or younger. Over the course of the summer, they scrambled to heed Graham’s seemingly simple advice: make something people want. We watch the founders work round-the-clock, developing and retooling products as diverse as a Web site that can teach anyone program­ming, to a Wikipedia-like site for rap lyrics, to software written by a pair of attorneys who seek to “make attorneys obsolete.” Founders are guided by Graham’s notoriously direct form of tough-love feedback. “Here, we don’t fire you,” he says. “The market fires you. If you’re sucking, I’m not going to run along behind you, saying, ‘You’re sucking, you’re suck­ing, c’mon, stop sucking.’” Some teams would even abandon their initial idea midsummer and scramble to begin anew. The program culminated in “Demo Day,” when founders pitched their startup to sev­eral hundred top angel investors and venture capitalists. A lucky few attracted capital that gave their startup a valuation of multiple millions of dollars. Others went back to the drawing board. This is the definitive story of a seismic shift that’s occurred in the business world, in which coding skill trumps employment experience, pairs of undergraduates confidently take on Goliaths, tiny startups working out of an apart­ment scale fast, and investors fall in love.