Is The Four Steps to the Epiphany the source of all written material on starting a business?
Context
I've followed the rhetoric that is heard and shown in the media - build a pitch deck, find co-founders, talk to VCs, build a product to show the user.
After going through The Four Steps and its successor and The Startup Owner's Manual this year, I've just realized how wasteful and demoralizing all those steps were.
This post is part reflection, part question if someone has found the source of all of this, and part saving others the time it takes to get to the core.
Expanding on the question
After reading a plethora of articles and books since I decided to start my own company, I've found The Four Steps and its successor - The Startup Owner's Manual - to effectively encompass all the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.
Even The Mom Test, for example, just provides an improvement of a section in The Startup Owner's Manual.
These two books by Steve Blank are extremely dry reads but are the most methodical on the subject I've ever seen. For example, The Startup Owner's Manual contains approximately 15 checklists for going from 0 to 1.
Some questions
- Is there even more fundamental material to be read around "Entrepreneurial Science", as Steve calls it?
- Also, has there been any further work or breakthroughs around "Entrepreneurial Science" in the recent past or is there any expectation of a new order?
In my research, I've never found Steve mentioning an even more atomic system of entrepreneurship or a successor to his theories and approach to entrepreneurship.
Rather than answering the question, I have a question for you: Why are you asking this in the first place?
These are all vague theories that are far from hard sciences, so comparing them to find the ultimate "fundamentals" makes no sense.
I've been stuck in this loop of trying to analyze/cross-reference/compare things rather than doing practical things and getting instant feedback and would hate to see another person getting stuck in it as well.
Not trying to say doing/reading about entrepreneurship is useless, but I'd spend maybe 20-30% of my time doing that and 70-80% doing actual things (building out my product, promoting it on different channel, a/b split testing things once I get enough traffic, talking to users, etc.)
Thanks for your comment, @zerotousers. I've added the context to the question.
The motivation is primarily a reflection of my multiple failures to start a company.
And I have a general drive for getting to the source of things because most of the epiphanies we have daily were just undiscovered truths - truths already discovered by someone else or not researched or reflected on sufficiently by us.
Not trying to be critical, but in your list of media rhetoric and those books in specific, you’ve skipped probably the most important thing: talk to potential customers.
A telling omission, maybe?
Calling myself out as much as anyone else. I thought I had signal and started building, but seem to have lost the thread.
Yes, finding customers, asking them the right questions, listening more than talking, and analyzing what they say have probably been the last but the most important things I've learned over the years.
Regarding "more fundamental material", Blank was in some ways preceded and apparently influenced by Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming and John Boyd among others.
With respect to "further work": First, the Lean Startup movement in large part builds on Blank's ideas (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Blank#Lean_startup_movement ). Also, following the widespread adoption of the Lean Startup approach, there have been a number of counter-proposals for how startups should operate -- most notably from Peter Thiel, Ben Horowitz (of Andreessen Horowitz) and in a series of articles by various authors in the Harvard Business Review.
Thanks for the names of the initial influencers. I'll be looking up books and articles especially by the predecessors. I'm currently reading Lean Startup.
Could you mention some articles or chapters within books of the counter-proposals for how startups should operate post the Lean Startup approach.
Sure, here are links to the sources I mentioned with regard to counter-proposals:
Peter Thiel: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296
Ben Horowitz: https://a16z.com/2010/03/17/the-case-for-the-fat-startup/
Harvard Business Review articles:
https://hbr.org/2019/10/what-the-lean-startup-method-gets-right-and-wrong
https://hbr.org/2018/05/strategy-for-start-ups
https://hbr.org/2016/03/the-limits-of-the-lean-startup-method
https://hbr.org/2015/05/lean-doesnt-always-create-the-best-products
https://store.hbr.org/product/if-you-really-want-to-change-the-world-a-guide-to-creating-building-and-sustaining-breakthrough-ventures/14235