Startup Owner's Manual
by Steve Blank, Bob Dorf · first published 2012
67% recommend31% neutral1% critical
Why HN recommends it
Step-by-step customer development guide with checklists and a roadmap for validating ideas, finding a market, and reaching first customers. Suited to first-time founders, developers, and B2B startups.
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The Startup Owner's Manual. It's a classic, but for some reason not too popular. As the subtitle says, there are literally step-by-step instructions on how to build a great company. It's a little dry. It's a 600 page book. And…
on “Ask HN: Which books made you the most money?” ↗Hello all. I'm a developer and a serial bootstrapper. I have yet another idea for a software service that I am getting ready to begin development on. This time I've read the excellent "The Startup Owner's Manual" by Steve Blank and am working on determining what the MVP of my service is by slowing stripping out the features I think it can float without. As I am stripping out features, I am reducing initial cost…
on “ASK HN: Does Minimal Viable Product Mean Minimal Viable Price?” ↗…exercise (that part will come eventually, but for now I'm basically just doing on mountain bike ride of about 2 hours, on Saturdays). http://www.amazon.com/Living-Low-Carb-Controlled-Carbohydrat... The Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. The successor to the famous The Four Steps to the Epiphany, this is the Bible of Customer Development. http://www.stevenblank.com/startup_index_qty.html Winning The Knowledge…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012” ↗I used Steve Blank's formula he described in "The Startup Owner's Manual". Steve is a legend and the process works. I spent 12 months working on a variety of startup ideas, testing them in the market, pivoting and moving on to the next one. Eventually we found one that got…
on “Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?” ↗…money (potentially a lot) and doesn't generate necessarily generate quality feedback because the people you're targeting aren't invested in helping you. Also: read The Four Steps to the Epiphany or The Startup Owner's Manual.
on “Ask HN: Where do you find potential customers to validate your idea / MVP?” ↗…want", with all these new-fangled buzzword-y tools like customer development interviews, business model canvases and even "pivoting" as a means to this end. While the Ries book is useful, Steve Blank's The Startup Owner's Manual (http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By-Step...) is phenomenal and the ideas there certainly "transfer very well outside the world of tech start-ups." Take what works, leave what doesn't,…
on “Too Many Pivots, Too Little Passion?” ↗…Start here: http://www.ycombinator.com/resources/ There are many wonderful articles written by Graham himself. - The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank. - The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki. - The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. - Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel. - ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever,…
on “Ask HN: Reccommended reading to get up to speed on Hacker/Startup culture” ↗Read The Startup Owner's Manual, or the previous version of the same, Four Steps to the Epiphany, and apply what you've read.
on “What skills are most crucial for running small internet companies?” ↗…over 90 days. If you're the head of a new startup, you're lucky if you have more than one person writing code after 90 days. The most practical checklist I've seen is Steve Blank and Bob Dorf's The Startup Owner's Manual. It's still not very practical, but it highlights very important things like landing sales, getting product market fit, and common mistakes. A lot of these other checklists will have you spend all your…
on “Ask HN: CTO to-do list for new software product startup” ↗…if you wind up doing some of it "out of order" it may be sub-optimal, but it's probably not the Kiss of Death either. My advice would be to read The Four Steps to the Epiphany and/or the follow-up The Startup Owner's Manual, and then watch all of the videos from the most recent Startup School session, and then start the Customer Discovery process from the beginning. Worst case, you can always release a new version with a…
on “Ask HN: What to do after product launch?” ↗…how much they would be willing to pay to get their problem solved. Then ask if your solution is helpful and show them a demo. Steve Blank is the Godfather of customer development. I highly suggest the Startup Owner's Manual. But if you don't have time to read that all right now, just realize you need some in-depth interviews (preferably in person interviews) and then use the Google Adwords landing page test as a mass scale…
on “Ask HN: I tested an idea with AdWords, are the result good enough to work on it?” ↗…is great, but they need some methodology, best practices, fundamentals of business, case samples and advices also. Books like “Business Model Generation”, by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur, “The Startup Owner´s Manual”, by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf could be very useful. Here in Brazil we have the recented lauched book in portuguese called “Empreendedorismo Inovador – Como Criar Startups de Tecnologia no Brasil”, 25…
on “Why Startups Die” ↗You say you get people physically before, why are you not taking that approach for your first customers now? I highly recommend checking some of Steve Blank's online courses as well as the Startup Owner's manual. These discus the need to do customer development and to literally "get out of the building" and talk to you first potential customers.
on “Ask HN: Spent two thousand dollars on adwords and got zero sign ups, now what?” ↗…product, with heavy emphasis on market, and marketing. It also addresses some of the common mistakes we, as developers, tend to make when conceiving and carrying out the execution of an idea. 3. "The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company " ebook - http://amzn.to/V3BxWq dead tree book - http://amzn.to/12DNfwd This is classic, really. What was interesting for me in particular is the…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012” ↗My advice: Read The Four Steps to the Epiphany or The Startup Owner's Manual. @sgblank talk about this in detail. At the risk of sounding flippant, you can basically reduce it to "talk to customers". Note however, that @sgblank does NOT advocate collecting the union of all…
on “Ask HN: How do you decide features set of your product?” ↗