Here's the loose process we'll follow for building a startup:

Step 1: Experience a problem yourself so that you can propose a realistic solution in the form of a startup. Talk to others to ensure there’s enough people who suffer from the same problem.

Step 2: Identify the market opportunity. Use the “Why now” market timing process from Lesson 2 to identify the most promising startup ideas. The most de-risked idea is often whichever has the most “market pull,” which ensures people will actually buy your product. Market pull is described in Lesson 1.

Step 3: Build the smallest effective version of your product. Do not do more work than is necessary to roughly solve the problem and prove that people will continually use the product.

Step 4: Iterate on your product so that it maximizes user happiness (“net promoter score”) and users’ desires to continue using the product (“stickiness”). Stickiness is covered in Lesson 4.

Step 5: Scale growth—targeting one persona at a time. Don’t make your product everything to everyone. Instead, be an incredible solution for a select few then iteratively expand your audience until you’re sticky for as many people as possible without diluting or bloating your product. (If you go too broad, competitors can pick you apart by doing a better job focusing on narrower use cases.) I cover growth in Acquiring Customers, Growth Channels, and Growth Teams.

Step 6: Hire an increasingly better team. I cover hiring in Lesson 6 and Growth Teams.