Remember my post “Why Games Are Fun: The Psychology Explanation“? In it, I wrote:

“Fun games operate on the principle that our actions will definitely bring us closer to the goal. If you go and slash rabbits (action), you will definitely gain experience points (relation), and you will eventually level up (goal).

This is the reason so many people, including myself, have failed at difficult, uncharted things like entrepreneurship. There’s no guarantee that our next step will bring us closer to the goal. For example, we could easily invest 6 months into building a product that nobody wants to buy. Now, that specific problem can be ameliorated through processes of customer development, but the general problem still exists.

So what is Customer Development?

Customer development is an entirely new approach to taking a product to market. The old school method of Product Development is this: spend a long time building something, launch publicly with lots of PR and advertising fanfare, cross your fingers and pray for the best. But Customer Development is this: find a set of customers with a common need, and then build a product that meets that need. Although you’re developing the product, you’re really developing the quintessential customer who is hopefully representative of a big market.

For a long time the only place to really learn about  Customer Development was by reading this book called Four Steps to the Epiphany written by the guy who invented customer development. Much respect to Steve Blank for inventing customer development, but his book is really boring, dyslexic, and generally confused. The reason such a smart guy wrote such a shitty book is because Four Steps is actually a compilation of lecture notes meant to be used as a companion to a course taught by Mr. Blank himself. But people bought it anyway because it was the only codification of this new and intelligent business strategy.

But now there’s another book about customer development, and it actually makes sense. It’s only 75 pages long, it uses pretty colors, and it clearly defines its terms, one at a time. The writing is practical and lucid but not pretentious and imaginative; the exercises it provides are actionable and useful. It’s called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development and it’s available at http://www.custdev.com (apparently you can use the  coupon code “LEAN” for a discount), and it’s Four Steps to the Epiphany without the suck.

After reading it and completing some of the exercises, I immediately felt better about my business projects. I feel like I know exactly what my risks are, and what to do next. The road is mapped out and the ambiguity is removed. In fact, the day after I finished reading it, I reached out via phone to 20 potential customers and set up two meetings for this week. So not only did I get the feel-good high of reading a business book, but it actually helped me get results immediately.

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