The Four Steps to the Epiphany

By: Steve Blank

Narrated by: Graham Rowat

Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins

Publisher's summary

The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the lean start-up approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that start-ups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Start-ups search for business models while existing companies execute them.

The book offers the practical and proven four-step customer development process for search and offers insight into what makes some start-ups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.

Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, and testing your assumptions are all explained in this book.

Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing, and your business for success.

If your organization is starting a new venture and you're thinking how to successfully organize sales, marketing, and business development, you need The Four Steps to the Epiphany. A must-listen for anyone starting something new.

©2020 Steve Blank. (P)2020 Gildan Media

The origin of Lean startup!

The best book on building a successful startup I’ve ever read. This is as close to giving you a framework for success as a book can come.

What every startup should know!

All founders and employees with a mission must listen to this book. Steve Blank provides the diagnostic tools and approach to customer discovery, finding repeatable and scalable business models and designing sales roadmaps that lead to IPOs! Okay, lets slowdown on the IPO until after the global recession ;-)

Cannot Stand This Narrator’s Voice/Reading Style

The content of the book is great, but the narrator’s voice/reading style is UNBEARABLE to listen to.

Lives up to the hype

The “first principles” of the lean startup movement. This is the one book to read if you are starting a new company.

Must read for startups

Great read on how lean startups should operate and what they should focus on. Loved learning about the customer development cycle.

Great way to understand how a company succed

Its a book full of examples of how to build a successful business environment. Very easy to read and complete

A must read for all entrepreneurs!

This book is so full of excellent, practical advice I immediately read it a second time after finishing.

Piercing Narrator

Blank's work is indisputably excellent. The whining, piercing narrator and his attempts at "acting" negatively impact the listenability of this product.

Lean Startup - the unpolished version

If you got to this book you probably know Steve Blank is the person who actually developed the ideas and methods later called "The Lean Startup" and popularised by his student Eric Ries.
Now, the thing is, all the basic ideas of "The Lean Startup" were already detailed in this book years before; why then was "The Lean Startup" needed? Because of the awkward way this book was constructed. In "The Lean Startup", Ries generally describes an idea and then tells several stories of how this basic idea was implemented in different instances. IMHO, this is a great way to ignite learning and thinking with intelligent and experienced people. On the contrary, this book is built mostly as a set of to-do lists explaining exactly how to implement those same ideas in every possible instance (sort of an algorithm). Only a small part of the book is real-life examples. And, a to-do list is not very interesting, it is not thought-provoking or creativity-igniting.

Hence, if you already read "The Lean Startup" and would like to somewhat complete your view of the theory, this book would be of great help. If you didn't, I suggest reading "The Lean Startup" first.

A decent business book ruined by a cartoonish reading

The best part of this book is its relentless effort at getting you to think about business from the customer perspective, which it does convincingly. Sadly, this decent book on business is completely marred by the narration. This gentlemen would be better suited in radio or television, where cartoonish characters are surely needed much more than in Audiobooks. Less the fault of the narrator than perhaps the producer/publisher that cast him, the voice becomes an incredibly distracting and ridiculous presence, even while the content is strong. As far as the material, Its business advice outside of the customer acquisition process is a little thin, but that’s ok: its thorough breakdown of acquiring customers and the importance of that process makes it worth it. But I’d recommended this book in written form. Crossing fingers one day they re record the audiobook.