The User Method

How Entrepreneurs Create Successful Innovations

By: Jeff Schwarting

Narrated by: Jeff Schwarting

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 percent of the Harvard student body join in less than one month; Dropbox wound up with one 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 10 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 percent 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 19 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.

©2015 Jeff Schwarting (P)2016 Jeff Schwarting

SO cool. Audio from Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Wozniak and Nick Woodman etc was AWESOME.

So what if I wrote it? I listened to it on a long drive the other day and loved it.

It's quick, engaging, and overall highly enjoyable.

Phenomenal

Just listened again and, again, excellent points made. This book basically lays out the absolute best path forward for people wanting to develop products and start businesses.

Home Run!

What did you love best about The User Method?

Jeff really hits it out of the park with "The User Method". It's such a simple concept, yet so very powerful. As I get ready to create my next business it absolutely reinforces the fact that I'm on the right path. The real world examples he offers up are essential to driving the point home.The audio version is exceptional as you get to hear a lot of the people he quotes in the book in their own words. Very innovative. A MUST READ FOR ANY WOULD BE ENTREPRENEUR!

What was one of the most memorable moments of The User Method?

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Which character – as performed by Jeff Schwarting – was your favorite?

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Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

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Any additional comments?

Love the audio version even more than the book.

A fun, insightful and short listen

A business book that challenges norms from the practical experience and observations of an entrepreneur.

Exceptional Insight

This is short, but packed with clear, actionable insight. In a class with The Lean Startup, Start With Why, and Zero to One.