"Talking to Humans is the perfect complement to the existing body of work on customer development. If you are teaching entrepreneurship or running a startup accelerator, you need to make it required reading for your students and teams. I have. "
Steve Blank, Entrepreneur, educator and author of The Startup Owner's Manual
"If entrepreneurship 101 is talking to customers, this is the syllabus. Talking to Humans is a thoughtful guide to the customer informed product development that lies at the foundation of successful start-ups."
Phin Barnes, Partner, First Round Capital
"The book is really great! It perfectly fills the gap for a practical, step-by-step guide to conducting customer discovery. I'm updating my syllabus now to incorporate Talking to Humans into my class immediately as required reading."
Cynthia Franklin, Senior Associate Director, Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship, NYU Stern
"Giff has been one of the thought leaders in the lean startup movement from the very beginning. Entrepreneurs in all industries will find Talking to Humans practical, insightful, and incredibly useful."
Patrick Vlaskovits, NYT bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur
"Getting started on your Customer Discovery journey is the most important step to becoming a successful entrepreneur and reading Talking To Humans is the smartest first step to finding and solving real problems for paying customers."
Andre Marquis, Executive Director, Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, University of California Berkeley
"A lot of entrepreneurs pay lip service to talking to customers but you have to know how. Talking to Humans offers concrete examples on how to how to recruit candidates, how to conduct interviews, and how to prioritize learning from customers more through listening versus talking."
Ash Maurya, Founder of Spark59 and author of Running Lean
"A must read for anyone who is considering creating a startup, developing a new product or starting a new division. Read this book first – a great guide to the evolving art of customer discovery. Don’t waste your time building products that your customer may or may not want."
John Burke, Partner, True Ventures
"This is a great how-to guide for entrepreneurs that provides practical guidance and examples on one of the most important and often under practiced requirements of building a great startup—getting out of the office, talking directly with customers and partners, and beginning the critical process of building a community."
David Aronoff, General Partner, Flybridge Capital
"Current and future customers are the best source of feedback and insight for your new product ideas. Talking to them is intimidating and seemingly time-consuming. In this focused, practical, down-to-earth book Giff Constable demystifies the art (not science) of customer discovery helping entrepreneurs and product veterans alike learn how to build a continuous conversation with their market and ensure the best chances of success for their ideas. Want to know what your audience is thinking? Read this book!"
Jeff Gothelf, author of Lean UX
We wrote the book to help people learn how to talk to their real or potential customers. Given that we all communicate with other people every day, you would think this would be an easy task, but our instincts tend to be all wrong. After watching countless entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs struggle with customer development concepts, we decided to put together this short, practical guide.
The book takes you through the story of two entrepreneurs doing customer discovery for the first time, and then proceeds to give you concrete tactics, tools and examples to answer key questions such as:
We created the book as a resource for students and the entrepreneurial community, so you can download it here for free.
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Giff Constable (giffconstable.com) is a repeat entrepreneur and currently the CEO of Neo, a global product innovation consulting company. He has held product design and business roles in six startups, and provided M&A and IPO services to technology firms while at Broadview/Jefferies. He was one of the earliest adopters & bloggers of the Lean Startup movement, co-organizes the 4,700-person Lean Lessons Learned meetup in New York, and tries to give back to the entrepreneurial community through mentoring and speaking engagements. He lives outside of New York City with his wife, two children, and an excessively rambunctious retriever.
Frank Rimalovski brings over 20 years of experience in technology commercialization, startup and early-stage venture capital investing. He is executive director of the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute, managing director of the NYU Innovation Venture Fund, Adjunct Faculty at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, and an Instructor in the NSF’s I-Corps program, having trained and mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs in customer development and lean startup methodologies. Previously, he was a founding partner of New Venture Partners, director/entrepreneur-in-residence at Lucent’s New Ventures Group, and has held various positions in product management, marketing and business development at Sun Microsystems, Apple and NeXT. He lives outside of New York City with his wife, two daughters and his increasingly mellow mutt.
Tom Fishburne (marketoonist.com) started drawing cartoons on the backs of Harvard Business School cases. His cartoons have grown by word of mouth to reach 100,000 business readers a week and have been featured by the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and the New York Times. Tom is the Founder and CEO of Marketoon Studios, a content marketing studio that helps businesses such as Google, Kronos, and Rocketfuel reach their audiences with cartoons. Tom draws from 19 years in the marketing and innovation trenches at Method Products, Nestle, and General Mills. He lives near San Francisco with his wife and two daughters.