I've been reading The 4 Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank. I couldn't have decided to open the book and start reading at a better time! Just right for this new stage of the NEH and the Cells of the Earth project. So I thought I would start applying its advice, which in fact, is very related to Business Model Generation and I am very excited about the new book, The Startup Owner's Manual, with the integration of the two concepts, to be launched in March (pre-order: Ticked!). This book [The 4 steps to the epiphany] is all about the Customer Development concept and process. The first advice I took was what I read as "make sure anybody who might be in your team, knows and agrees to use the Customer Development process"...That is why I'm writing this.
So I thought that in order to agree on using the Customer development process, we need to know what the process is, what kind of effort it implies and what we're meant to do in each of the stages. To fulfill that need without having to buy the book I decided to go through a kind of painful process: Creating a Prezi about it. The editing is painful, but there are big rewards, the concepts are definitely staying in my mind. Here it is. I suggest you use the full screen mode to watch the presentation, otherwise some parts will be hard to read. It is not too visual, but it is definitely not as long as the ...you gotta be kidding me!!...looking at how many pages the book has (282), I just found that there is a summary of all what I've been doing for the last 2 days...any way...it's not too visual, but it is very helpful and very much worth it to make the decision to agree or not on it. I'm wondering if The Startup Owner's manual is going to change much what I know about Customer Development and Business Model Generation...just wondering.
After you play with the presentation, you'll notice I'm on Phase 0: Getting a team to buy-in the process, core values and to present my problem hypothesis and product vision so we can start Phase 1. I think this corresponds to the Mobilize stage of the Business Model Generation process, which I found hard to get going because I didn't really have the instructions I found in Blank's book. I also wanted to mention that I won't worry much about using the mainstream business vocabulary. Although I don't agree with much of it, I hope that the description of the hypothesis will put it clear what I am about. My intention is to use mainstream business vocabulary to start with and "upgrade" to what I'd think is a more appropriate vocabulary later, when the startup starts using its own invention to recreate itself.
I'm using this evernote notebook to keep all my notes related to the first step of the Customer Develpment process, which is Customer Discovery. So everything you need to know about it, will be there. Check for updates.
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