The User Method: How Entrepreneurs Create Successful Innovations

by Jeff Schwarting, Christina Catron (Editor), Shelby Falabella (Editor)

Forget everything you've learned about creating new businesses. Forget market research. Forget customer interviews. Forget everything business schools teach. Forget about "finding pains in the market," or gaining user empathy, or validating hypotheses.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Without doing any of that, Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook and had 75% of the Harvard student body join in less than one month; Dropbox wound up with 1 million users and a hockey-stick growth curve seven months after launch; the founder of Spanx went from selling fax machines door-to-door to becoming the world's youngest self-made female billionaire in just over ten years.

But if their success wasn't the result of traditional tactics, how did they do it? Dumb luck? Genius intellect? Magic?

Despite what you were taught in business school and the enticing maxims of the latest "five ways to innovate" articles, the reality is that 50-80% of successful innovations are created by people who simply made something they wanted to use. Then they showed it to other people.

This model accounts for an astounding portion of the world's successful innovations, including the nineteen user method cases:

- Apple

- Facebook

- Ford

- Uber

- GoPro

- Dropbox

- Porsche

- Instagram

- Airbnb

- YouTube

- Spanx

- Qualtrics

- Sunrider

- Patagonia

- Basecamp

- Pebble

Built on hundreds of hours of research and thousands of data points, The User Method tells the astoundingly simple stories of how the founders identified massive opportunities, created phenomenal products, and grew iconically successful businesses, and draws out patterns to form straightforward, replicable principles for innovation and entrepreneurship.

Genres: Business

289 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2015

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can't really trust this review, because I wrote the book. That said, I've read it many times and do find it to be quite good, especially if you're interested in starting a business or curious about that process. As it turns out, almost everything business schools and articles teach is either overly complex or hopelessly useless, and in both cases, largely untrue. The way innovation really occurs is surprisingly simple. Astoundingly so, in fact. It's one of those things your hear and think, "oh yeah, that makes sense. I've seen that a million times but just haven't heard it articulated until now."

The User Method makes its points through fascinating stories about how companies like Apple, Facebook, and Gopro started, and offers bountiful examples and proof to support its claims.

It is both enlightening and enjoyable and if you've read this far in the review, you should pick up a copy.

[Seth Ferguson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't normally binge read, but after I started "The User Method" I couldn't put it down. I often find myself thinking about the underlying reasons behind why some businesses are so successful, while other "great" business ideas fail. "The User Method" has some extremely relevant insight into why, and it's safe to say that it effectively debunks ideas in "The Lean Startup" and other startup world classics.

I highly recommend it to anyone interested in innovation, and startups. I've already shared this book with several of my friends!