The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Develop the Product for the Few, Not the Many 

In a traditional product management and marketing process the goal is to develop a Marketing 

Requirements Document (MRD) for engineering. The MRD contains the sum of all the possible 

customer feature requests, prioritized in a collaborative effort between Marketing, Sales and 

Engineering. Marketing holds focus groups, analyzes sales data from the field, and looks at customer 

feature requests and complaints.  This information leads to requested features that are added to the 

product specification, and the engineering team builds these features into the next release.  

While this process is rational for an established company entering an existing market, it is folly 

for startups. Why? In established companies, the MRD process ensures that engineering will build a 

product that appeals to an existing market.  But in either case the customers and their needs are 

known. In a startup, the first product is not designed to satisfy a mainstream customer. No startup 

can afford the engineering effort or the time to build a product with every feature that a mainstream 

customer needs in its first release. The product would take years to get to market and be obsolete by 

the time it arrives. A successful startup solves this conundrum by focusing its development and early 

selling efforts on a very small group of early customers who have bought into the startup’s vision. It 

is this small group of visionary customers who will give the company the feedback necessary to add 

features into follow-on releases. Enthusiasts for products who spread the good news are often called 

evangelists. But we need a new word to describe visionary customers—those who will not only spread 

the good news about unfinished and untested products but also buy them. For that reason I often 

refer to them as earlyvangelists.

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PT