REQUIRED READING

 

Steve Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany is the original book about customer development. When I was building IMVU, a dog-eared copy of this book followed me everywhere. It is an indispensable guide. You can get a copy here: http://ericri.es/FourSteps or read my review of it here: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-customer-development.html. Steve also maintains an active and excellent blog at http://steveblank.com/

Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits have created a short but excellent book called The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development, which provides a gentle introduction to the topic. You can buy it here: http://custdev.com or read my review here: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2010/07/entrepreneurs-guide-to-customer.html

When I first began blogging about entrepreneurship, it was not nearly as common an occupation as it is now. Very few bloggers were actively working on new ideas about entrepreneurship, and together we debated and refined these ideas online.

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Dave McClure, founder of the venture firm 500 Startups, writes a blog at http://500hats.typepad.com/. 500 Startups has an excellent blog as well: http://blog.500startups.com/. Dave’s “Startup Metrics for Pirates” presentation laid out a framework for thinking about and measuring online services that greatly influenced the concept of “engines of growth.” You can see the original presentation here: http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2008/09/startup-metri-2.html as well as my original reaction here: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/three-drivers-of-growth-for-your.html

Sean Ellis writes the Startup Marketing Blog, which has been influential in my thinking about how to integrate marketing into startups: http://startup-marketing.com/

Andrew Chen’s blog Futuristic Play is one of the best sources for thoughts on viral marketing, startup metrics, and design: http://andrewchenblog.com/

Babak Nivi writes the excellent blog Venture Hacks and was an early Lean Startup evangelist: http://venturehacks.com/. He’s since gone on to create Angel List, which matches startups and investors around the world: http://angel.co/

Other fantastic Lean Startup blogs include:

• Ash Maurya has emerged as a leader in helping bootstrapped online businesses apply Lean Startup ideas. His blog is called Running Lean, and he also has released an eBook of the same name. Both can be found here: http://www.runningleanhq.com/

• Sean Murphy on early-stage software startups: http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/

• Brant Cooper’s Market by Numbers: http://market-by-numbers.com/

• Patrick Vlaskovits on technology, customer development, and pricing: http://vlaskovits.com/

• The KISSmetrics Marketing Blog: http://blog.kissmetrics.com/ and Hiten Shah’s http://hitenism.com