You may not agree with the principles advocated by Eric Ries or Steve Blank. If you don’t, my own experience tells me that you probably haven’t read their books, and feel comfortable judging them by their cover or, at least, their Amazon summaries.
Regardless, you will likely agree that it’s unwise to build a technology company which only solves a problem for one company.
At Unifize, we were mindful of this reality and apprehensive about leaping to broad conclusions on the basis of our interactions with a single manufacturer of wind, turbine and gas steam generators.
So, armed with our own, well-thumbed copy of the Four Steps to the Epiphany, we visited 24 other manufacturing and engineering companies in India, only to discover a repeating pattern of failed product development objectives.
Maybe we were on to something? Maybe not?
We hadn’t started Unifize to solve a local problem. We not only needed to get out of the building. We also needed to get out of the country.