a lot of money because so many users continue to use both the Waze and Google Maps apps. The two companies essentially turned their users into customers because they were able to monetize them, and because of this, from here on out, I am going to use the terms “user” and “customer” interchangeably. Still, a good business model doesn’t just define the revenue stream of a product. Nor does it just rely on a ridiculous number of users adopting it. This is something often lost on young tech entrepreneurs. Because they grew up in a world in which products like Facebook became solvent and conquered the world without an obvious business model, they don’t realize what an uphill battle they have ahead of them to acquire users. They also forget that the megasuccessful digital products that continue to define our everyday lives didn’t just stumble onto their business models. These game-changing companies experimented, tested, and failed before they hit on and innovated the right one. And if, like me, you worked on the Web when the dot-com bubble burst in the 1990s, you have firsthand experience of all of the risks involved in creating products without proven business models. When the investment money runs out, and there isn’t any more coming in, life is bleak. The process of business-model construction is foundational to a business strategy. As Steve Blank writes, a business model describes the “flow between [13] key components of the company.” This quote comes from Blank’s Customer Development manifesto, in which he challenges product founders to stop writing static business plans. Instead, he encourages them to adopt a flexible business model that requires all of the key components to be validated using empirical, customer-facing discovery methods. To get a sense of these key components, let’s take a look at a tool called the Business Model Canvas. [14] In their seminal book Business Model Generation, authors Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur deconstruct each of the nine essential building blocks of a business model so that visionaries can systematically think through the logic of how the company will eventually make money. Blank also refers to this tool in his own work on business-model creation. What’s relevant to us in this book is how many of these components align with the UX strategy for a digital product. They are as follows (see also Figure 2-3): Customer segments Who are the customers? What are their behaviors? What are their needs and goals? Value propositions