Review of "Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development"

I’m using this book as a Guide for Yesware, and it’s been a great touchstone. I read through it in a morning, and now it sits, heavily annotated, on my desk for quick reference. It’s a great book if you:

• Are starting a business right now
• Are running a P&L in a larger company
• Are studying current trends in entrepreneurial thinking

This Guide effectively gathers and summarizes the concepts of the leading actors in the Customer Development/Lean Startup school of running a business – including Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, Andrew Chen, Ash Maurya, VentureHacks, Cindy Alvarez and April Dunford. Before this, there was one self-published book on the topic and hundreds of excellent but hard to find blog posts scattered around the web. So it’s fantastic to have the main themes of CD gathered authoritatively in one short book. The Guide doesn’t advance the discussion significantly, and it lacks some of the analytical models that are available on line, but it’s clearly written, thoughtfully organized and definitely worth your time. Note: A slightly shorter version of this review originally appeared on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/dgg6Eu