Summary: In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank lays out a customer development process that complements a startup's product development process.  Blank explains how to effectively bring a product to market. IN doing so, he applies many principles of Lean Thinking, sparking a very popular movement in the entrepreneurial startup world: The Lean Startup. He argues that there are many methodologies for software development, product development, process improvement, but no formal methodology - a tried a true method - for starting a company or getting a new product to market. As a response to this, he developed Customer Development. Most startups follow the "if we build it, they will come" worldview. Customer Development takes a different approach. Though frequent iterations and actual interaction with potential or prospective customers, they play a hand in helping the startup develop the product. This requires the founders to get out of the office and experience what the customers thinks. BoomStartup emphatically endorses this book

A different kind of business world calls for a different kind of business manual, and that's what Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur have achieved in their New Age guide to contemporary business modelling, entitled Business Model Generation. Abetted by their "Business Model Innovation Hub" - with 470 outline collaborators in 45 countries - Osterwalder and Pigneur practiced what they preached when they applied their modeling concepts to the book's production. And the concepts are not just theories:major companies such as IBM and Ericsson are converts to the "Business Model Canvas," a low-tech template for brainstorming and visualizing corporate roles and processes. The book's breezy, colorful format, replete with photos, drawling, chart and graphics,belies its intensely researched and reality-grounded content. A big sheet of paper and a slew of Post-it notes are all you need to get started; that, and the combined creativity, intellect and persistence your team brings to the project. BoomStarup heartily recommends this comprehensive, pictorial handbook to entrepreneurs and business leaders looking to create or redesign their business models.