The Four Steps to the Epiphany

In reality none of these is the true objective. Simply put, a startup should focus on reaching a deep understanding of customers and their problems, their pains, and the jobs they need done discovering a repeatable roadmap of how they buy, and building a financial model that results in profitability.

Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a proven financial model.

In startups the emphasis is on “get it done, and get it done fast.” So it’s natural that heads of Sales and Marketing believe they are hired for what they know, not what they can learn.

Instead, he was out in the field listening, discovering how his customers worked and what their key problems were.

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?

A startup is in reality a “faith-based enterprise” on day one. To turn the vision into reality and the faith into facts (and a profitable company), a startup must test those guesses, or hypotheses, and find out which are correct. So the general goal of Customer Discovery amounts to this: turning the founders’ initial hypotheses about their business