Reddit reviews The Four Steps to the Epiphany

It's a tad geared towards software and B2B SaaS, but it can apply to anyone: Four Steps to the Epiphany

It focuses on finding your customers and developing products for them. Reads like a textbook from college somewhat, but my #1 go-to business book by far.

If you are going for a internet business or any product-oriented business here a are the best books



BEST ONES

"The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses" (Eric Reis) - 2011

https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/

"Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works" (Ash Maurya) - 2010

https://www.amazon.com/Running-Lean-Iterate-Plan-Works/dp/1449305172

"Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days" (Jake Knapp - Google Ventures) - 2016

https://www.amazon.com/Sprint-Solve-Problems-Test-Ideas/dp/150112174X/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1550802301&s=gateway&sr=8-1

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ALSO GO FOR (these are the ones that started organizing the Startup world)

"The Four Steps to the Epiphany" (Steve Blank) - 2005

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0989200507/

"Business Model Generation" (Alexander Osterwalder) - 2008

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/

I'm sorry if the reply turned out a bit too general, but the individual steps depend a lot on the specifics :)

As I said before, it's crucial that you understand the problem domain as good, or better than your customers. I like to think of it as the Fog of War in strategy game maps. I can only effectively perform once I have explored enough territory to see the big picture. Here's roughly how I would try to wrap my head around such a challenge, if the company hired me to help:

Customer

Who are the customers? It's actually possible to think of the customers just in terms of their needs and desires. But it's useful to know their demographic attributes, so you can choose whether your solution is going to be a lateral or a niche one. For instance.. Trello is a lateral solution, because the kan-ban methodology can be applied to many different types of problems. On the other hand, It could be argued that 500px is a niche solution, because it caters to photographers more than meme authors. It's very easy for 500px to figure out where photographers hang out online and in the real world, should they choose to reach out to them in any way.

The job (Problems / Desires)

The customers usually have some sort of job to be done. That job is driven by their desire for a benefit, or a lingering problem that needs solving. Those benefits can range from monetary to peace of mind or social status. And problems can range in severity. Furthermore, different customer segments can rate some problems and benefits as more important than others. This is the combinatorial explosion of stakeholders and their points of view, that informs a strategy of a good product designer, and causes an uninformed designer to arrive at an optimal solution only through brute force or sheer luck.

Solution

Sometimes the solution has to be drawn up from scratch, optimized or entirely re-imagined. So what is the existing solution? What would an utopian solution look like? A complex problem might require a solution in the form of a toolkit of multiple core activities (Like Google, HubSpot or Moz). A focused solution though, can be embodied in a single product (Caffeine.app keeps your mac from going to sleep). If a solution is complex behind the curtains, but you make it simple and gratifying from the user's point of view, it may seem like magic to them.

Business

The things that you do behind the curtains are some core activities, that might require some key resources. That's how the business makes sure it spends less than it earns on a customer (unit economics). It's easy to paint a picture where the world is split between sociopathic capitalists with a greedy agenda & empathic designers, who champion the user's priorities. But a similar solution with a sound business foundation will always be better for the customer, because it stands a better chance of outperforming the economically inferiour solution in the long run. It's the job of a designer to balance between the two aspects. So much so, that the Elements of User Experience places big emphasis on both Business Objectives & User Needs.

Communication

Once you love your people, and you have a way to show it to them, you'll have to start and maintain some sort of relationship. You can identify Touch Points or Channels. If, for instance, your customers are tourists looking for a place to grab a meal before boarding the next train, you can administer your solution right then and there, at the train station. But most of the time you'll be reaching out to your potential users somewhere between you and them, probably through a third party (online publication, app or ad network). It may take multiple exposures in different contexts, before somebody decides to give your solution a try. So a customer might bump into your message at certain touch points, open a communication channel like a newsletter or notification subscription, and only then decide to commit. There's often talk about a multiple stage funnel, through which we try to shove as much of our target market. But you can also look at customer lifetime stages as vertebrae in the cohort spine. For instance.. Slicing out customer segments by lifetime lets SoundCloud identify differences between a newcoming podcaster & a long-time podcaster, and communicate with each of them appropriately, even though most of the people that care about SoundCloud are producers and record labels. Staying on top of communication also helps you avoid conversion attribution mistakes, so you can communicate more effectively.

Here are some resources related to those subjects:

• Value Proposition Design, Alexander Osterwalder: How to map the Customer, their Problems and Desires to a Solution.
  
• The Innovator's Dillema, Clayton Christensen: Describes how disruptive innovators solve existing problems in novel ways.
  
• Minto Pyramid Principle, Barbara Minto: How to communicate the value propositions to a rationally minded customer.
  
  A bit more business related:
  
  
• Four Steps To The Epiphany, Steve Blank: A user-focused methodology for efficiently finding a viable business model, called Customer Development.
  
• Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder: His first book takes a broader look, dealing with booth the business and customer side of things.
  
• Lean Startup, Eric Ries: What Steve Blank said.
  
  Once I have a good understanding, I would focus on Information Architecture, Experience Design, Production & Iteration. I can't spare the time to write about those now, but here are some related resources:
  
  
• Elements of User Experience, Jesse James Garret: What a typical experience design process is made up of.
  
• About Face, Alan Cooper: Another take on the whole process, dives a bit deeper into every stage than Garret's book.
  
• Don't Make Me Think, Steve Krug: One of the first books to gave the issues of IA and UX design a human, customer point of view.
  
  I might write more about the specific subjects of IA and UX later, when I find the time. In the meanwhile, check any of the three books with italicized titles, if you haven't already.
  
  Peace o/

Nah people said this about every technology sector ever.

BUT! OP, you'll have to talk with hundreds (read again, 100s) of potential pilot customers before you even start to have a clue about what might be useful. Read this: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/0989200507

Forget the LeanStartUp stuff to begin with, this book is the perfect blueprint for creating and/or growing a business. I've used the ideas in the book to build my business. (https://bubblecow.com/)

Read this book. Four Steps to the Epiphany. It focuses on customer development and making sure you build what customers want.

• Read The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development.
  
• Meet and talk to as many prospects as you can.

There is product development, and there is customer development. You get the second one. Read Four Steps to the Epiphany.