State of Customer Development Survey Raffle Winners
Hi everyone! Thank you for your participation in the survey, especially if you were kind enough to tweet about it. (While the raffle is over, if you haven’t responded, the survey is still open.) The purpose of the survey was two-fold. First, we thought it would...Seller Beware: Customers Have Their Own Agenda
Note: One of the more difficult aspects of customer development is understanding when to listen to customers/prospects and when not to. When should you rely on intuition and when is the customer right, if not always? Steve Blank’s oft quoted clarion call to...Customer Development Presentation
Unlike my classmates who headed to Silicon Valley from UC Davis upon graduation, I moved to Washington DC to work for a defense consulting firm. After a couple of years, “I dropped out” to write a novel, which I subsequently finished, explored the country...4 Anti-Lean Startup Archetypes
There are many reasons why entrepreneurs don’t, or more accurately won’t adopt lean startup principles. In the last few weeks, I’ve encountered each of the archetypes described below. In each case, the individuals have some awareness of...Lean Start-up, Part V – MVP Fail
(To view prior posts in this series, click here.) I think I’ve mostly failed to limit product development to minimum viable product (MVP). The essence of MVP is counter-intuitive to entrepreneurs who know what needs to be built. MVP is downright anathema to...
How to find early adopters
The toughest part about practicing customer development is getting started. You already know that customers are not going to magically find you because you have a great product, work hard and are good looking. Now that you’ve realized how big the world is and that using a megaphone from your roof top is a poor method of user acquisition, what’s next?
Presumably if you are committed to the principles of customer development, you are already committed to “getting out of the building.” Before you can interview potential customers, however, you have to find potential customers to interview. Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets. This is painstaking work. Just as with other portions of the customer development model, to find early adopters you make assumptions, test, and iterate. If you are having trouble getting started, try these steps:
Who owns the vision?
I love the work Eric Ries is doing with Lean Startup. (IMO, coupled with an investment model where funds are predicated on implementation of lean startup principles and achieving specific customer development milestones #leanstartup could revolutionize the start-up and investment landscapes.)
Words are powerful and and the intent of catchy phrases can be lost when removed from their original context. I brought this up before a few weeks back, when the “Fail Fast” meme was cruising through Twitter and among some cheerleaders, it seems, failing itself had become the best means to success, as if it were the end objective, as if tripping your way to finish line will ensure you are the winner.
So it goes, IMO, with this quote about the customer’s vision:
Early customers are often more visionary than the startup they work with for that product.
I’m not so sure. So while the initial intent of the phrase is not to misplace ownership of the vision, I fear (perhaps unwarrantedly so) that upon oft-repeats or retweets, that the wrong message emerges. Not to repeat myself, but one has to treat customer input carefully.
#CustomerDevelopment by Company Stage & Product Type
Customer Development must be tailored to what type of business you are and where you are as a business. All businesses, not just Internet-based ones, can benefit from customer development principles, but the ease/difficulty varies quite a bit depending on product, business model, and your knowledge of the market, etc.
Clearly an Internet based product has advantages both in terms of customer development and fast-iteration product development, over software applications. I’ll go out on a limb here and rank difficulty based on product type this way:
b2c internet -> b2b internet -> b2c software -> b2b software -> hardware
No great revelation here. I’m going out another limb and say the significance of customer development increases as you go from left to right, while the significance of fast-iteration product development runs from right to left. This is not to diminish applying both principles as much as possible in all cases, but that the nature of the product determines which will predominate.
Products toward the left are less expensive to develop and deploy and customer learning is more inherent in their nature. The cost/failure is lower. If you haven’t practiced customer development principles, e.g., interviewing customers about a particular issue’s pain level, you will learn soon enough whether your product solves a real problem. Practicing Eric Ries’ lean startup principles can serve in lieu of practicing some of the customer development steps. Further, many assumptions are actually facts. IMVU’s customers are online. They can be reached online, they use web sites to learn about products, they reference online users who are similar to themselves, and they buy online. You don’t have to interview your online customers to determine those basic facts as you must for other product types.
