The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Who Is This Book For? 

When I first started writing this book, I thought its audience would be small and its applicability 

would be narrow. I first believed that my readers would be startup entrepreneurs.  

With this audience in mind, I went out to talk to venture capital firms and their portfolio 

company startups to test the Customer Development concepts. Many of these startups were past the 

“we’re just starting out” stage. At first, I thought the Customer Development model might be 

interesting reading for them, but not particularly germane to CEOs and other executives who were 

in the midst of building a company. This group had real day-to-day operational problems to solve, 

and the last thing on their minds was to read some abstruse text about what they should have done 

last year. But the more I talked to these startups and spent time understanding their issues, the 

more I realized that they were all under pressure to solve a common set of problems: Where is our 

market? Who are our customers? How do we build the right team? How do we scale sales? These 

issues are at the heart of the Customer Development methodology.  

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Winners and Losers   

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Not surprisingly, there is a large body of literature on the success and failure of new products in 

large companies. The more I read and then talked to large corporations, the more I became convinced 

that the Customer Development model is even more applicable to existing companies attempting to 

launch new products into new markets. The challenge of understanding customers and finding a 

market is the same for a large company as for a startup. But large companies have established well-

defined processes and procedures that are the antithesis of the Customer Development model. In 

other words, the guidelines for starting a new product in a new market are the antithesis of the well-

honed rules observed by large and successful enterprises. Indeed, those rules are a recipe for failure 

when it comes to a startup-like initiative. The cost of launching new products into new markets can 

exceed the absolute dollars a startup spends by several orders of magnitude. While the expected 

returns are huge, making these type of mistakes in a large company can be catastrophic.  

Finally, I had found my audience for this book: any team launching a new product, from a small 

entrepreneurial startup to a large corporation. This book is not just for the CEO but all executives 

and employees of early stage ventures; it’s for all the founders, the engineers, the VP of Sales, the VP 

of Marketing, etc. – anyone who is struggling to come up with answers on how to find customers and 

markets.  This book will help all of you to bring rigor to the Customer Development Process. 

Throughout this book, I use the terms entrepreneur and startup  quite liberally. The terms 

encompass the brave souls in Fortune 1000 companies just as much as they describe three teens 

starting in a garage.  

This or any road map will only take you where you want to go if you have the discipline to follow 

it, together with the vision and passion that characterize the best entrepreneurs. As with great 

artists, these are innate qualities that make successful serial entrepreneurs a rare breed. Relentless 

execution is also something that is hard to get from a book. It is best learned by being thrown out of 

the offices of countless prospective customers as you try to learn what appeals to them. It means 

getting off the floor and going back to a customer who said “no” and finding out how to turn that into 

a “yes.”  

This book will point the way. Completing your own hero’s journey is up to you.