The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

"The most valuable book on entrepreneurship in the past 25 years!"
— Tim Huntley, An Entrepreneurial Life

"To avoid infant/instant mortality of your venture and boost success chances, this book is a 'must-have' and must practice.'" -- Alexander Osterwalder, author, "Business Model Generation"

"... a seminal text in the new experiential and inquiry-based methods of entrepreneurship education."-- Patrick Vlaskovits, co-author, "The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development"

"the best $40 investment you make in your startup."-- EdSurge

"... The book has material for every type of entrepreneur ..."-- XConomy

"Brilliantly Simple 2-step Process for Success in Products and Services!"-- Kimberly Wiefling, author, entrepreneur

“A ‘bible’ for entrepreneurs who owe it to themselves and their investors to read … and re-read.”
-- Founder

“A must-have for all aspiring, first-time and seasoned entrepreneurs.”
-- Ben Mappen, founder

“truly a blueprint on how to build a Silicon Valley style scalable startup.”
-- Founder

“By taking this book BEFORE you spin up, founders can save thousands of dollars and man hours in mistakes.”
— Scott Hoffman, author, speaker, small business advocate

“ (Blank is) one of the smartest and most commonsense thinkers I know on starting a company and harnessing creativity for start-ups.”
-- Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

"The Startup Owner's Manual is ... going to be a game changer."
-- India Business Blog

"Many, including myself, consider the 'Four Steps to the Epiphany' to be the bible of entrepreneurship. ... The Startup Owner’s Manual is a definitive manual for building successful new companies – for entrepreneurs in startups and large companies."
— Conrad Egusa, Brownstein & Egusa

"The process outlined in The Startup Owner’s Manual will prevent the waste, mistakes, and failures that come from launching too soon or too expensively- perhaps exactly what’s needed."
— Kia Davis, Wamda.com

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups.  The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide.  Why?

The Startup Owner's Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, acknowledged catalyst of the "Lean Startup" movement, and tested and refined by him for more than a decade. 

This 608-page how-to guide includes over 100 charts, graphs, and diagrams, plus 77 valuable checklists that guide you as you drive your company toward profitability.  It will help you:
·        Avoid the 9 deadly sins that destroy startups' chances for success
·       Use the Customer Development method to bring your business idea to life
·       Incorporate the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses
·       Identify your customers and determine how to "get, keep and grow" customers profitably
·       Compute how you'll drive your startup to repeatable, scalable profits.  

Power your startup to success with The Startup Owner's Manual.

This near-encyclopedic guide unlocks the secrets to startup success - walking you, step-by-step, through the tested and proven Customer Development process created by startup expert Steve Blank.

Whether you're launching a physical channel startup or one that will sell through web/mobile channels, on these pages, you'll learn how to:

Use the Customer Development method to bring your business idea to life

Conduct your search for a scalable, profitable business model

Incorporate the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses

Find Product-Market fit

Get, Keep and Grow customers

Fuel growth with metrics that matter

Avoid the 9 deadly sins startups commit most often

The Startup Owner's Manual lays out the best practices, lessons and tips that have swept the startup world, offering a wealth of proven advice and information for entrepreneurs of all stripes.

It is the go-to resource for thousands of startups, leading universities (including Stanford, U.C. Berkeley and Columbia) and the U.S. National Science Foundation, among many others.

Use it in conjunction with The Startup Owner's Manual -- Founder's Workbook (bit.ly/SlPQqc), an interactive tool for tracking your progress through the Customer Development process.

The Startup Owner's Manual is what it says : a comprehensive, step-by step guide to getting startups right. It walks entrepreneurs through the Customer Development process that gets them out of the building, where customers live, to develop winning products customers will buy.

About Steve Blank
Steve Blank is a driving force in innovation, helping to radically reshape how startups are built and how entrepreneurship is taught. His new Startup Owner's Manual is his latest addition for entrepreneurial practitioners. Steve created the Customer Development methodology that spawned the Lean Startup movement. He teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley and Columbia. His blog, steveblank.com, is "must" reading among entrepreneurs. In 2011, Steve created the Lean LaunchPad, a hands-on class using Customer Development to train students as well as elite teams of scientists and engineers selected and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. Steve arrived in Silicon Valley in 1978, as boom times began, joining his first of eight startups. After 21 years the results were two deep craters, several "base hits," one massive "dot-com bubble" home run, and immense experiential learning that resulted his first break-through book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
 
About Bob Dorf
Bob Dorf is a serial entrepreneur, founding his first success at age 22 and, since then, six more--"two homeruns, two base hits, and three great tax losses," as he puts it. He's advised and/or invested in a score more startups since. Dorf is often called the "midwife of Customer Development," having critiqued early drafts of The Four Steps to the Epiphany; he and Steve have been friends and colleagues ever since. Entrepreneurial from his teens, Bob received his last W-2 almost 40 years ago, when he quit his editor's job at New York's WINS Radio to launch his first successful startup. When he's not running K&S Ranch Consulting with Steve, Dorf teaches "Introduction to Venturing," on Customer Development and getting startups right, as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School.