The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Company 

Building

 

Customer 

Discovery

 

Customer 

Validation

 

Customer 

Creation

 

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The Four Steps to the Epiphany   

home office market simply had no compelling need that made Front Desk a “must have,” especially 

at a high price. FastOffice had a solution in search of a problem. 

When Steve and his team realized that individuals were simply not going to shell out $1400 for a 

“nice to have peripheral,” they needed a new strategy. Like all startups faced with this problem, 

FastOffice fired its VP of Sales and came up with a new sales and marketing strategy. Now, instead 

of selling to individuals who worked at home, the company would sell to Fortune 1000 corporations 

who had a “distributed workforce”—salespeople who had offices at home. The rationale was that a 

VP of Sales of a large corporation could justify spending $1400 on a high-value employee. The 

thought was that the “new” product, now renamed HomeDesk, could make a single salesperson 

appear like a large corporate office.  

While the new strategy sounded great on paper, it suffered from the same problem as the first: 

the product might be nice to have, but there was no compelling problem it was solving. Vice 

presidents of sales at major corporations were not going to bed at night worrying about their remote 

offices. They were worrying about how to make their sales numbers.  

What ensued was the startup version of the ritualized Japanese Noh play I mentioned in 

Chapter 1. Faced with the failure of Plan B, FastOffice fired the VP of Marketing and came up with 

yet another new strategy. The company was now on the startup death spiral: the executive staff 

changed with each new strategy. After the third strategy didn’t work either, Steve was no longer 

CEO and the board brought in an experienced business executive.  

What’s interesting about the FastOffice story is not that it’s unique but that it’s so common. 

Time and again, startups focus on first customer ship, and only after the product is out the door do 

they find out that customers aren’t behaving as expected. By the time the company realizes that 

sales revenues won’t meet expectations, it’s already behind the proverbial eight ball. Is this the end 

of the story?  No, we’ll revisit FastOffice after we explain the Customer Discovery philosophy. 

Like most startups, FastOffice knew how to build a product and how to measure progress toward 

the product ship date. What the company lacked was a set of early Customer Development goals that 

would have allowed it to measure its progress in understanding customers and finding a market for 

its product. These goals would have been achieved when FastOffice could answer four questions: 

•  Have we identified a problem a customer wants solved? 

•  Does our product solve these customer needs? 

•  If so, do we have a viable and profitable business model? 

•  Have we learned enough to go out and sell? 

Answering these questions is the purpose of the first step in the Customer Development model, 

Customer Discovery. This chapter explains how to go about it.