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.