How do you come up with an idea?

The book covers five different ways to generate startup ideas!

How do you test an idea?

As the book describes, you need to start with a hypothesis. This article gives a bit of an overview as to how you generate them.  If you want more depth, and especially an analysis of the difference between hypotheses in science and entrepreneurship, you can read this critical perspective .

The next choice is what experiments you should run. Here is an academic paper  covering experiments and when to do them, and you may also find this guide  provides a somewhat helpful approach to thinking about what experiments to run; you will also find more advice on the Big Week assignment. Now, on to the details:

• Customer Interviews.  Here is a good primer  on the key questions to ask in customer interviews, and why you want to ask them. As for tips, here  is a reasonable guide for user interviews, and some tips  from Gif Constable, who also has a nice book  on conducting customer interviews (with hints on B2B as well as B2C).  Here are also some decent tips for user interviews  from Google Ventures (which can help with the questions about who to interview).  You will notice some contradictions in tips and advice - there is no one true path.  The more interviews, the more you get to experiment and learn your style.

• Surveys. Having read through a bunch of the popular guides on surveying for startups, I think almost all of them are full of misinformation - I can't recommend any of them, with the exception of the rather basic starter guide from Google Ventures .  If you do want to learn a bit more about surveying, however, the Harvard Program on Survey Design  has a good overview on questions. Qualtrics also has some good tips on question design  and on finding samples .

• Prototypes/Wireframing. The Skeptics Guide to LoFi Prototypes  is an excellent place to start, as is the NESTA guide . If you are considering wireframing, you should take a look at the Six Revisions guide .

• Smoke Tests. This is a reasonable guide  to thinking through the basics of smoke tests, and here is the story  of how one company used them successfully.

• A/B Tests. There was a good piece  recently in HBR in running A/B experiments.  Here  are some A/B resources. Finally, First Round has a good story on A/B testing as a management approach .