When Bob Dorf and I wrote The Startup Owner’s Manual we listed a series of customer-development principles. I thought they might be worth enumerating here:

A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable model

1. There Are No Facts Inside Your Building, So Get Outside
2. Pair Customer Development with Agile Development
3. Failure is an Integral Part of the Search for the Business Model
4. If You’re Afraid to Fail You’re Destined to Do So
5. Iterations and Pivots are Driven by Insight
6. Validate Your Hypotheses with Experiments
7. Success Begins with Buy-In from Investors and Co-Founders
8. No Business Plan Survives First Contact with Customers
9. Not All Startups Are Alike
10. Startup Metrics are Different from Existing Companies
11. Agree on Market Type – It Changes Everything
12. Fast, Fearless Decision-Making, Cycle Time, Speed and Tempo
13. If it’s not About Passion, You’re Dead the Day You Opened your Doors
14. Startup Titles and Functions Are Very Different from a Company’s
15. Preserve Cash While Searching. After It’s Found, Spend
16. Communicate and Share Learning
17. Startups Demand Comfort with Chaos and Uncertainty

Quite a few people have asked for a way to remember these without having to dig through the book.  So by popular demand, here’s a poster of the Customer Development Manifesto.  You can order a copy here.

Nail it to your wall.

Nail the manifesto to your wall.   Get your own poster here:http://sblank.com/HpwmuN