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The Startup Owner's Manual cover

The Startup Owner's Manual

The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

The exhaustive playbook for finding customers before building the product.

by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf

A dense, step-by-step manual that lays out the Customer Development process for taking a startup from idea to scalable business. It walks founders through customer discovery, validation, creation, and company building, distinguishing the search for a business model from its execution. The book treats startups as temporary organizations searching for a repeatable, scalable model, not smaller versions of big companies.

It gives founders a concrete, checklist-driven process for testing assumptions with real customers instead of guessing in the building. For anyone running a young company, it turns the vague advice to talk to customers into a structured operating system.

Where to get it