Q: Can We Launch First and Ask Customer Discovery Questions Later?

Don’t do a big launch before you have completed customer discovery or you are running a very expensive test of your key customer and market hypotheses.

Q: We have built an application that lets small businesses employees easily manage vacation days. Here is our game plan. What do you think?

Objectives	$2,000 a month (in revenue) in 6 months. Written up in 2 major publications
Target Users	Small Business
Metrics	Page views Number of users who sign up for trial that we convert Who’s paying for our product (identify industries to target). Measure the impact of weekly blog posts
Branding	Logo Home page redesign. Improve copy on home page and sales page
Paid conversion	1 month trial instead of free Collect emails and generate a monthly newsletter for paying customers. Improve “first use” experience after signup.

 

Complete Customer Discovery Before You Run An Expensive Marketing Campaign

A: You are making an implicit assumption that you have the right features for the right target customer to deliver a compelling benefit. This is a marketing campaign that assumes you have validated the key customer and market hypotheses.

You should be in a customer discovery mode with a new app like this, formalizing your assumptions and hypotheses and engaging in conversations with early prospects and early users to determine where you can create differentiated value. This is a brutally competitive space and a target of “Small business” is not a useful discriminant.

Vacation obligations and payment are subject to regulatory oversight, so while it’s good to stress the ease of use it would be useful to explore the integration required with the payroll system to make it truly stress free for a manager or small business owner.