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Werken van Steven Gary Blank

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The original inspiration for Lean Startup / Not easy to read or follow.
 
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BizCoach | 4 andere besprekingen | Jul 29, 2020 |
Probably a great book for someone looking to do or be involved in a startup. Interesting but ultimately just not a fit for where I am, and thus I abandoned it.
 
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Skybalon | 4 andere besprekingen | Mar 19, 2020 |
The best way to characterize "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" is as a guide for people who want to create products, but don't know what products they want to create, why their target customers 'must have' them, or even who their target customers are. If all these things are true, then innovators/engineers will find this a useful book that leads them through the basics that startups often neglect because they just focus on building technology without a real purpose, and those products turn out to not be very sellable.

Steve Blank is a popular professor at Stanford, and former serial entrepreneur, who is an engaging speaker and prolific blogger. This book originally started as class notes, which is why it is a bit of a disorganized and poorly written jumble. It could easily be 1/10 the volume, and impart the core of its useful knowledge much more clearly. In fact, I would recommend looking up Steve Blank on YouTube -- you'll find much of the best material from this book is better presented and more coherent in his talks than in this book. He's also an entertaining speaker whose rhetoric is easier to take in a verbal presentation than peppered throughout a text book, and in the spoken context, it (the rhetoric) also helps to make his points.

Many readers have given this book a much higher rating than my 2 stars. When this book was originally published, I would agree that it had greater value because it offered a unique viewpoint that was understood by only a few (that a startup is not a small version of a big company, but actually has a different purpose and needs different behaviors to succeed), but today there are several better books that elaborate on different elements of this much much more effectively, including Blank's own "Startup Owner's Manual", Eric Ries "Lean Startup" and Rob Fitzpatrick's "The Mom Test", especially when it comes to customer development and generic startup methodology. The weaknesses and poor writing in this book have become much more apparent over time, and even the basic thesis that this is the best way to start a startup is questionable.

I would also call out a quote that the previous reviewer has highlighted "The difference between the winners and losers is simple. Products developed with senior management out in front of customers early and often win. Products handed off to a sales and marketing organization that has only been tangentially involved in the new Product Development process lose. It's that simple". This is a rhetorical and gross over-simplification which is provably false, and it is characteristic of much of Steve's hyperbole. There are many examples of successful products that were built before the notion of customer development was articulated, where products were handed off to sales and marketing, that have won. And, having senior management out in front of customers early and often does not guarantee success -- there are many other factors that go into success, and even this statement assumes that the CEO is a good listener, a good manager, and takes the customer input to build something that can be sold in sufficient quantity at a profitable price that the business becomes a going concern. Many of today's current crop of Silicon Valley startups have employed the processes and thinking that this book describes, but even today with the benefit of these insights, 80% still fail. In general, I agree with the sentiment, but if you take statements like this at face value, you will naively increase your chances of failing.

So, my rating of 2 stars is based on these factors -- the quality of writing, the organization of the book, the fact that much of the information is dated or better articulated in more recent books, and that a well-edited and condensed version would be far more useful as a startup guide than this bloated and rhetoric-ridden text. For me, 2 stars means "Fair" -- there is some useful information, but not enough that this should be the first book you buy on the subject or a primary source.
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paulpaetz | 4 andere besprekingen | Apr 15, 2016 |
Number one book to read on entrepreneurialism. If you can practice the principles outlined in this book, you'll be a successful entrepreneur [unlike most books of this sort].
 
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willszal | 4 andere besprekingen | Jan 3, 2016 |

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