Nail It then Scale It - The Entrepreneur's Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation

Nail It then Scale It ranks up there with game changing classics like Porter's Competitive Advantage, McKenna's Relationship Marketing, and Moore's Crossing the Chasm. Nail It then Scale It is based on real-world experience that is validated by many millions of dollars of investment in entrepreneurial startups. The Nail It then Scale It process underscores that the seeds to entrepreneurial success are sown before you build anything.

Nail the customers' pain.
Nail the solution customers are willing to pay for.
Avoid the traps of conventional wisdom that lead most entrepreneurs to failure.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book:

Why Believing in Your Product Leads to Failure. "All too often, entrepreneurs fall in love with their product or technology, they ignore negative feedback from customers, and they spend years building a product based on a vision that no one else shares."

Why Having too Much Money Leads to Failure. "Money allowed the entrepreneurs to execute their flawed business plan rather than to stay laser focused on the market so that they could find the facts about what customers wanted and adjust accordingly."

Where Do Winning Innovations Come From? "The key difference... is not to just ask customers what they want but to deeply understand the customers--their motivations, their needs, and most important, the job they are trying to get done... Thomas Edison stated that `I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it'."

As Ahlstrom points out, commitment of money is a very powerful validation. "The price your customers are willing to pay is the measure of the degree to which you have nailed the solution."

Fail Fast and Learn to Change. "By remembering to fail fast, you focus on rapidly testing your assumptions, iterating swiftly, and then, because you have less attachment, you can see when you need to abandon one approach in favor of a better approach."

Focus on Simplicity. "Somewhat counter-intuitively, simplifying increases customer adoption and reduces costs. Customers are attracted by simplicity and confused by complexity... Entrepreneurs should focus on developing the minimum feature set to close a customer purchase."

Unquestionably worth my time.

Since 1995 I succeeded in creating two software startups without funding and failed in others. For the past several years I've read programming books hoping to find a technical edge, and entrepreneurial books to determine what I did wrong and what I must do to get it right the next time.

I concluded that more programming is pointless until I find the right idea and validate my business model, but the entire process wasn't clear to me.

Then I read, Nail It then Scale It. Complimentary to the book Boom Start, it is the best entrepreneurial book I've ever read. Within the first twenty pages I recognized my previous mistakes. Now I better understand the entire process of innovation, identifying deep customer pain, testing and validating solution hypotheses.

This book teaches the innovation and validation process from start to finish. By applying its best practices, l have the confidence I need to build the next big thing--one that delivers a simple, elegant solution that customers' want.

Five stars--I highly recommend it.