Job Titles That Can Sink Your Startup

This is something that irritates me about business writing. Parable != evidence, since I construct a parable after the fact, to make a specific point.

Also, like witty aphorisms, it's just as easy to support either side of an argument. E.g. "the early bird gets the worm" v.s "the second mouse gets the cheese".

Why is this startup searching for a business model? Shouldn't you start with that and build your company around it?

Again, apologies if this is a naive POV.

He espouses that you should build a minimal product based on your idea. Then iterate over the following points seeking traction and revenue

1) "Get out of the building" and go talk to a lot of your potential customers

2) Based on what you learn from those people: Reevaluate your idea and decide if you should iterate more, or start a new direction

3) Develop #2

4) goto #1

Think of it as the scientific hypothesis/experiment cycle for startups

[edited to add the below]

As usual, Steve says it more succinctly and powerfully than I. I guess that's one reason why he gets to teach at Stanford :)

Here's how he puts it [1]

  Your startup is essentially an organization built to 
  search for a repeatable and scalable business model.  As 
  a founder you start out with:
  
  1) a vision of a product with a set of features,

  2) a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the 
     business model: Who are the customers/users? What’s 
     the distribution channel. How do we price and position 
     the product? How do we create end user demand? Who are 
     our partners? Where/how do we build the product? How 
     do we finance the company, etc.
  
  
  Your job as a founder is to quickly validate whether the 
  model is correct by seeing if customers behave as your 
  model predicts. Most of the time the darn customers 
  don’t  behave as you predicted.

  ...

  How do you know your business model is the right one? 
  When revenue, users, traffic, etc., start increasing in a 
  repeatable way 

The idea for a startup is usually just a hypothesis. Once you go out and talk to real customers about what you're offering you'll gain some insight and new information. Most of the time, your original hypothesis is off the mark. Your idea may be slightly off, or completely wrong together, but armed with your new knowledge you can alter your hypothesis.

Repeat the process and eventually your evolving hypothesis will become more refined until you have a scalable and repeatable business model. This is the "search" that he's referring to.