The Startup Owner’s Manual is the latest book by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. It has been taking the business and startup world by storm. I read it only recently and realized how much you are losing by running your startup without reading and implementing this book.

These have been lot of gushing praise about this book, but one quote about this book in particular was apt.

"What Kent Beck and company did for agile software development, Steve Blank has done for the startup community."

If you don’t know Kent Beck, he was one of the first people to document design patterns, which allowed developers to talk about code at a higher level of abstraction. The startup owner’s manual documents the design patterns in early stage businesses. Kent Beck’s book is a seminal work in software development and I have no doubt that The Startup Owner’s manual is also going to be a game changer.

The book claims that it is "The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company". It lives up to it’s tagline. The book is highly prescriptive. It will tell you in detail what you should do on day 1 of your startup and what you should do once step X is done. (Most books in it genre have been descriptive, describing successful businesses and inferring what worked. The Startup Owner’s manual doesn’t pull punches. It is opinionated, it tells you exactly what you should be doing and when.)

Steve Blank is entrepreneur who started 8 companies, now is a professor at Stanford. He first wrote about customer development methodology in his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which is credited with jumpstarting the lean startup movement. This books builds on the ideas proposed in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, and provides more detailed and step-by-step guideline on how to go about doing customer development.

The book preface says "Don’t read too much at a time" and say "… this book has more in common with a car repair manual than your favorite page turner." Good points as this book is fairly dense and if you try reading too much at one do you will probably not get much out of the book. Thankfully the book is well organized in various time phase a startup is.

Depending on the phase your startup is you can choose what you should be reading.

A bit about customer development

Customer Development is a methodology of finding product-customer fit. It says your first ideas about who your customers are going to be, why they by, what channels they buy from are wrong. Only by talking to customers and trying them to buy you Minimal Viable product would you be able to find a customer for your product. You have to get out of building to talk to customers, you have to pivot your product to fit what the customer wants. This book tell you how to do customer development via customer discovery and customer validation.

Most startups would be happy to get the Director of Sales at Oracle to join their company as sales. The book tells you why this is a bad idea. "A startup is not a miniature version of a large company." A person who has experience only at a large company would like to grow big fast. Startup owner’s manual advises against scaling until you have achieved a product-market fit. The book is full of advice and how-to like this.

The book is divided in these sections.

1. A startup is not a small version of a large company.
2. The customer development model.
3. Introduction to customer discovery
4. State your business model hypothesis
5. Get out of the building: Do People care
6. Get out of the building: Test the solutions
7. Introduction to customer validation
8. Get ready to sell
9. Get out of the building and sell
10. Company positioning
11. Proceed or Pivot.

Each of these chapters deal with specific times of a startup lifecycle and tell you what you should be doing in that stage in a detailed how-to way.

Some caveats

1. The book is highly prescriptive and suited for US markets. Apply your common sense before applying everything suggested here.
2. The book is big 500+ pages, give it time and read chapters which affect you.

Links to Books

1. The Startup Owner’s Manual
2. The Four Steps to the Epiphany

[This is a guest post by Shabda Raaj of Agiliq. Their blog talks about many technical topics such as build web and mobile apps.]

[Note: Book links are affiliate links]

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Here is an overview of all the popular posts that were published on trak.in last week!

For a professional, Linkedin is probably the biggest platform for creating a personal brand – Here is how you can brand yourself on Linkedin!

If you are a new entrepreneur, this post will really help you – Critical Clauses that you should be aware of in a Shareholder’s agreement.

Indian Residential and commercial property market is at all time high, however, according to a new survey, Indian’s prefer second hand properties over new ones…

Customers are the king in any business – As cliché as it sounds, that’s a hard fact. You have to delight them, if you want to win them!

Ebay India recently published survey on popular gadgets and brands that Indians prefer. Samsung has taken lead in India, especially in Mobile & Television category.

Mobile Banking is one of the most popular activities that Indians carry out on their mobile. Infact, India has the highest mobile banking adoption in the world.

We put together a very interesting infographic last week based on findings from mysmartprice.com – The Indian Ecommerce Market Infographic.

Even with all the negative factors that Indian Economy is grappling with currently, it is expected to grow at decent 7.5% in year 2012 according to findings from ESCAP.

Airtel has partnered with Axis Bank to bring in Airtel Money Super Account which will enable millions to bank seamlessly on mobile phones.

Looks like Indians are moving away from traditional approach of going in for same career as their Education. A study finds that many pursue careers which are very different from the education they have acquired.

Here is a look at Global Mobile Handset market in 2012 – The mobile sales have actually declines, but smartphone growth has been fierce.

With smartphones proliferating faster, they are turning more and more gimmicky… or are they?

Finally looks like the much needed slashing of 3G data prices has taken place with Airtel leading with a solid 70% tariff cut on the 3G data plans.

Indian Postal Department has tied up with 8 new agencies to make Indian post offices as point of sale for various different offerings, which includes railway ticket bookings, mobile recharges, International money transfer and more…

Indian PC market has grown 7.7% in first quarter of 2012 and Lenovo has beaten Dell to become the top pc manufacturer in India.

And here is a look at all the Indian Funding, Private equity, M&A deals that were executed in previous week.

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Indian Post offices are improving – They are not only becoming high-tech, but also considerably increasing the bouquet of services they offer at their outlets. According to the statement by Mr. Sachin Pilot, Communications & IT minister, postal department has entered into agreements with 8 organizations including financial institutions to sell their products through the post offices in the country.

Post Offices in India will offer following Services

Regarding tie-ups with Western Union & Moneygram, it is not clear if it will allow only inward remittances or whether it will allow out ward remittances as well. According to me, one can only receive money, but because sending money requires lot of paperwork in India, it may not be possible to do it from Post Offices.

Another service that probably will help millions, especially in rural areas would be Booking / cancellation of Railway Tickets.

What do you think of these offerings by Indian Postal department ?

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Bharti Airtel nears purchase of Qualcomm’s Indian Mobile License

The talks about Bharti buying Qualcomm’s mobile license have been going on for some time seem to be coming to close. Qualcomm has reportedly asked Bharti Airtel to pay Rs. 5000 crore for its Indian unit. The talks are expected to close in 2 weeks time. Qualcomm, had bought the frequency licenses in cities including New Delhi and Mumbai in June 2010 spectrum auction, paying Rs. 4900 crore for the spectrum. Interestingly, Bharti Airtel’s 2G licenses will expire in 2014 and the company may have to pay much more TRAI’s new guidelines on 2g spectrum are approved. [Source]

Timesdeal-PayTM mobile recharge deal partnership garners record 70k orders

Timesdeal.com in partnership with mobile recharge company PayTM had offered a deal which allowed users to pay just Rs 50 and get a mobile recharge voucher worth Rs 100 from PayTM. This deal was a hit with users and garnered a record 70k orders. Also, this deal was available only to new users, so PayTM essentially brought 70k news users under its fold in one single day. Timesdeal.com witnessed a huge traffic surge, with more than 3,00,000 unique visitors visiting the site on the deal day. [Source]

Finance Minister defends Retrospective tax of Rs. 20k crore Tax on Vodafone

Looks like Indian Finance Minister, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, is not going to budge on the subject of applying retrospective tax on telecom giant Vodafone. The amendment made sometime back, allows transactions involving Indian assets to be taxed in India even if deals are executed overseas. Pranab Da defended the decision in Rajya Sabha yesterday and clearly told that Vodafone will have to pay tax on its acquisition of Hutchison’s stake in the $11.2-billion Hutichison Essar deal executed in Cayman Islands. [Source]

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Here is an overview of all the popular posts that were published on trak.in last week!

This one was a shocker for me – The CIC recently announced that under some circumstances, an individual’s passport information can be divulged by use of an RTI…

Most of the Indians know very less about one part of India and that is North East. Here is a survey that shows the perception that majority of Indians have about those North Eastern states, you would be surprised at findings.

Bangalore becomes the 2nd city after Kolkata to get 4G connectivity. Airtel launched it last week with much fanfare, though pricing of 4g services offered by Airtel would be a big disappointment.

We published 2 infographics last week:

• The Top 10 Resume Mistakes people make
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Here is a look at how the Top 5 Indian software services companies fared in FY 2011-2012. I must say Cognizant is making giant strides on the leaderboard, and may soon surpass Infosys to become the 2nd largest IT services company in India.

This news has surely brought smiles on face of Entrepreneurs. The implementation of GAAR, popularly known as the startup tax, has been deferred by a year.

According t a recent survey by Hay Group, Tata ranks 5th in Asia for its leadership.

India’s foremost mobile payments company Paymate has launched Paypos, a solution for merchants to easily accept payments on mobile using credit card.

Spice has launched a low cost handset which offers live TV and that too without any data connection. It directly receives analogue signals on-air!

Google has launched Google Apps vault in India – A Data storage, retrieval and mining solution for enterprises as well as small businesses.

Here is an wonderful article that you must read if you are interested in brands – GoldSpot, Postman and Gaylords: 3 iconic brands that need to be brought back

India’s foreign direct investment saw decent growth in last financial year. It grew 46% year on year to touch USD 28.4 Billion.

Here is a peek at what Indian men and women like to do on their smartphones. Women love to chat, while men dig Smartphone Apps.

We had a small exclusive last week for our readers. Engineers & scientists out there would be overjoyed to know that Scilab has been ported to Android by a team of students from IIT Mumbai. It will come pre-installed on Aakash.

According to press release by Tata Motors – They have completed first stage of testing their Air Car. Could this be real?

And finally a quick round up of all the Funding, Private Equity & acquisition deals that took place in the previous week.

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Here is an overview of all the popular posts that were published on trak.in last week!

The Indian consumer is getting more and more demanding – To cater to their needs many Indian Retailers & manufacturers are jumping into services game!

Finally, it looks like 3G prices are coming down – Last week aircel planned pocket internet smart plans, which offer 3G data usage at very competitive pricing.

Our post in 2010 on top cheap android phones had been a big hit, so we came out with an updated list. Here are the Top 5 cheap budget Android phones of 2012!

This is one post you must read – Look at how many Indians pay how much tax – I’d be surprised if you are not taken aback.

TRAI last week announced new Digital Cable TV regulations – Indian television consumers should be really happy with it. Even tariffs and pricing for Multi System Operators and broadcasters has been standardized.

Do you remember Vespa Scooter? Yes, the iconic scooter from yesteryear’s has been re-launched with a sporty new look for young and mobile Indians!

And the probably the biggest news in Gadget world last week was launch of Samsung Galaxy s3. It was probably the first time that consumers were so excited about the launch of a gadget which is not Apple. The Samsung Galaxy S3 is expected to revolutionize Android’s supremacy in Smartphone Market even more!

Indian Railways is getting modern – It will now start offering Wi-Fi on trains as ISRO has cleared satellite connectivity on trains for the use of internet.

As an internet consumer, I really hate one thing, and that is slow internet speeds. Even the latest Akamai report suggests that India is the only country in Asia to have average internet speed of less than 1 mbps. But, there is a silver lining – Although Desktop internet is not growing much, Mobile Internet is growing full throttle and is expected to surpass Desktop internet shortly.

Here is look at which mobile connection is better for you – Prepaid or postpaid mobile connection?

Last week Indian startup ecosystem got a major fillip – 5 year old Indian internet startup Slideshare got acquired by Linkedin for USD 500 Million!

The Mobile subscriber growth is back on track, albeit slowly – March 2012 saw 8 mln new mobile subscribers added, taking the total tally to 919 million new mobile subscribers

Some numbers in last week’s infographic is going to really surprise you – Here is how big apple is !

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Here is a quick look at the posts published last week on trak.in!

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The Delhi International Airport has seen tremendous improvement over past couple of years with launch of  Terminal 3. However, it still only the 62^nd best Airport in the world.

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According to a recent survey, India is the second most economically confident country in the world.

Do you know how credit / debut card numbers are generated, or what they represent? Here is a beautiful infographic that will help you understand what those numbers stand for!

Finally Google announces Google Drive – The much awaited, much rumored storage service that really has some great features going for it. The question though is – Are they late in announcing this?

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Sony Ericsson has not had much success in India in smartphone category in India, but their new Xperia NXT series is set to dazzle the smartphone market.

Datawind, the manufacturers of Aakash have come out the upgraded commercial versions of tablet called Ubislate7 and Ubislate7C.

Have you seen Cleartrip’s new redesigned dashboard? it was great, but now with the new redesign, it is even better than earlier!

Airtel has opened up its own online store in partnership with Infibeam. Unlike, NokiaShop and Sumsung store, the prices on Airtel shop are quite competitive!

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Skytrax, who offer the most prestigious & trusted awards for the Airline industry worldwide have announced “Best Airports in the World” Rankings for 2012. Incheon International Airport in Korea gets the coveted position of having the best airport in the world. It is followed by Singapore Changi Airport, Hong Kong International Airport, Amsterdam Schiphol Airport & Beijing Capital International Airport.

India’s Indira Gandhi International Airport gets the award for being the “Most Improved Airport in the World” thanks to the launch of modern T3 (Terminal 3) last year. Even with this improvement it ranked a lowly 62^nd in the world. In 2011, Delhi International Airport was ranked 95^th best in the world.

While Delhi’s IGI has improved, Bangalore International Airport has deteriorated and gone down in its ranking. It fell 8 places from 59^th last year to being the 67^th best airport in the world this year. Hyderabad International Airport also witnessed huge improvement to rank 77^th best in the world. Last year it was ranked 92^nd .

Best Airports in India as per Skytrax

It is interesting that smaller places like Amritsar and Goa have better airports than bigger cities like Ahmedabad, Pune & others. I also recently happen to visit the new Mangalore Airport, I thought it was one of the better ones and should have ranked above Amritsar and Kolkata.

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Many NGOs and organizations for social change have mushroomed in India in the previous decade but very few have expanded on the basis of scale and the impact on the community. After all, it’s a herculean task to scrape through red tapism in the government to be able to establish an NGO in the first place.

And considering the lack of transparency in transactions in our country, donations and sponsorships too are not easy to receive too. In spite of all these hurdles, there are a few NGOs that have made substantial social impact in India until now.

Smile Foundation

Formed in 2002, the Smile Foundation promotes the cause of education amongst underprivileged children. The people behind the Smile Foundation have envisaged children to be the building blocks of the future and hence have developed programs ranging from healthcare, education, livelihood, women empowerment to a system where privileged children can help their underprivileged counterparts.

To cite a more familiar example, the award winning documentary "I am Kalam" that was based on a cause for children was supported by the Smile Foundation.

Visit the website for more details: Smile Foundation

Nanhi Kali

Nanhi Kali is a sponsorship project that was started by Anand Mahindra in 1996, with the aim of breaking the vicious circle of poverty in India by educating the girl child. In partnership with 21 others NGOs that help the Nanhi Kali project to implement its cause, every sponsor gives a selected girl child the required academic and material support.

You too, can sponsor the education of a girl child with just Rs. 2400 or Rs. 3600 a year and get regular reports regarding her progress. Did you know that the goal of Project Nanhi Kali is to support education for 1,00,000 girl children by this year end?

Visit the website for more details: Nanhi Kali

GiveIndia Foundation

Most of you might have heard about the ‘Joy of Giving Week’ celebrations that find national coverage in the Indian media each year. This week of giving is hosted by GiveIndia Foundation which doesn’t do hands-on grassroots community work, but holds a unique position amongst Indian NGOs because. Why? Because it acts as an online and offline donation platform for more than 200 Indian NGOs that have been scrutinized through the GiveIndia scanner for their transparency and credibility in operations.

If you donate through GiveIndia, they will tell you exactly where your money has gone and follow it up with a feedback report. This organization for social change set up by an IIM-A alumnus has been the recipient of many awards for their work in creating accountability in the area of donations.

Visit the website for more details: Give India

Goonj

Listed by Forbes as India most powerful rural entrepreneur organization, Goonj has overtaken several milestones in adding value to the community in the past.

With the famous "Vastra Samman" program, Goonj has mobilized recyclable and re-usable items like clothes, books, grains, exports surpluses and much more from urban to rural centers.

With many donations points across the country, Goonj has been successfully channelizing more than more than 70,000 kgs of material every month, has a team of more than 300 volunteers and partners with 250 other organizations.

Visit the website for more details: Goonj

HelpAge India

Set up all the way back in 1978, HelpAge India has been providing support to India’s abandoned, poor and isolated elderly folk. Amongst many other ancillary functions to support the grey population of India, HelpAge India plays a critical role in influencing policy change for the elderly in governments and providing emotional and material support to the abandoned elderly.

From opening physiotherapy centers to sponsoring cataract operations, from providing help lines for the elderly to help them understand and fight for their rights, HelpAge India has come a long way. Did you know that this NGO also represents its cause in the National Planning Commission of India?

Visit the website for more details: HelpAge India

Whether you have monetary resources to give away or your time to be donated with some hands-on community work, you have many transparent donation options in India to choose from. With a variety of methods of giving now available, make sure you do your bit of good towards the society!

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