A quick comment on the “first step”: many starting entrepreneurs, who find the DE methodology very compelling, but get derailed by the “step” metaphor. As data from DEToolbox shows, they start enthusiastically, continue with the second step, but get disengaged/disinterested by the third or fourth step.
In entrepreneurship education, teaching step sequentially works. Since discipline is hard, in real-life situations a sequential approach never works. Most founders go back to building MVPs, pivoting, being lean and everything else that’s more exciting and glamorous than calculating your TAM or mapping your customer’s DMU.
What I found out to work is this approach and how I advise founders to apply it:

• Get together with the other founders and go through all 24 steps in an intensive 3-4 hour work session. Timebox each step to 7 minutes and do the best to have at least a generic, hypothetical, statement for each step. This will provide a 360-view of the business side of your idea. You can use the DE Canvas for this.
• With the big picture in front, it’s much easier to see where the gaps/inconsistencies or biggest assumptions are. Most of the times they will start in step 1, of course, but not all the times. You can then commit together to doing progress over the next 2-4 weeks on what needs to be done.
• Every 2-4 weeks (depending on dynamics/situation), do another 1-2 hour work session with the other co-founders where you discuss the findings and readjust the canvas/steps conclusions.

From my experience, nobody goes through all the steps. But always having the gratification of something complete (the draft canvas) makes it easier to progress, than doing it step by step. This also allows for faster iteration, since an assumption proven wrong in step 22 does not feel like being back to square one, having to start it all again.
What do you think?

Thank you so much Bill & Marius for sharing your insights.