I'm just discovering the lean startup methodology, and I was wondering which book (or other resource) is best for an overview of the methodology, as applied for a small startup, from a very practical point of view.

Start Small Stay Small was very close, but it did not espouse much Customer Development.

As you point out, it's not Eric Ries book. I suspect it's not Steve Blank's Manual, as it's more of a reference. Maybe the Manual has a brief overview as well ? I mean, to use it as a reference, you first need to understand the method and what to look out for.

Start Small is not about 'Lean Startups' per se. It's more about making something that works for you, without having too much of an ideology/movement/whatever. Insomuch as he talks about customer development, it's mostly techniques to appraise a potential market.

Rob Walling (author of Start Small Stay Small) also gives away for free a PDF ebook containing many of the stuff that is also present in the book. You just have to register on his blog site http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ and you'll receive a link. Of course doing so you'll be subscribed to his newsletter (but it's part of the customer acquisition "game", no? :-))

I'd recommend checking out The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: http://custdev.com - It's a very practical guide to the first part of customer development and complimentary to Steve Blank's book and Eric Ries's Lean Startup Principles. I recommend it to every entrepreneur that I talk to (which ends up being hundreds a year!)

I'd start with Nail it, Then Scale It.

Specifically for customer development, I'd check out The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

Steve Blank has been in the StartUp world for decades, just check his about page: http://steveblank.com/about/

And compare it to the author you're talkin about http://www.ashmaurya.com/about/ that clearly states in his page "In late 2009, I ran into into Steve Blank’s lectures on “Customer Development” from where I followed the trail to Eric Ries’ early ideas of the Lean Startup."

I seriously doubt Ash would have ever written "Running Lean" if it weren't for Steve. The whole notion of the "lean startup" emerged partly as a result of the influence of Steve Blank's work, on Eric Ries and others. Of course it would make sense that there would be overlap between the work of Ash and Steve (and Eric and others as far as that goes) but I very much doubt that Steve's book is in any way a "ripoff" of the book Ash wrote.

> Thanks for the downvotes because you kids can't read. I'm talking about the "Nail It Then Scale It" book being a copy, not "4 steps.."

A perfect example of why it's good to quote what you're replying to. Your message was so far over to the left, and was pushed down far enough below the actual post you were replying to, that the context got lost. Scrolling down the HN page, your reply appeared to be a reply to the parent post, implying you were calling Steve's book a ripoff.

Except it seems to have been published before Ash Maurya's.

Emphatic no!

The seminal work from which Ash's book (and mine) sprung was The Four Steps to the Epiphany, published in 2005.