Customer Development

Bill Meade: Customer Development and Schmexperts

Bill Meade (@BillMeade) is the Director of Data Science at Neal Analytics, a position he describes as, “Catalyst to a herd of genius cats, riding a machine learning cloud, into a business world about to discover analytical dreams can come true … easily. ” Bill has long experience with innovation, IP management, and customer  development. …

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Serious Problems With Business Model Canvas For Startups

Q: I’m just about to get out of the building to validate hypotheses and start learning, but I have a problem with the business model canvas. I have been advised to develop detailed hypotheses before starting customer discovery. This is my startup and I have no idea how to fill in the business model canvas …

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Customer Development and Channel Development

I am rescuing a dialog on customer development and channel development I had with Ash Maurya from the comments to his “Lessons Learned in 2010” blog post. I am still at work on the “system of simultaneous equations” model and I think his new thinking on the “Customer Factory” is moving closer to iterating against …

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Tristan Kromer on Testing Customer and Value Hypotheses

These are excerpts from  Episode 9 of Outlier on Air: Tristan Kromer, A Lean Approach to Business.  They are in the same sequence the took place in the interview but a number of stories and asides have been omitted to focus on what I felt were some extremely valuable insights from Tristan Kromer on clarifying and testing …

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User Experience Research vs. Customer Discovery

We Help You With Customer Discovery Q: Why don’t you ever blog about User Experience Research (UX)? The short answer is that we do customer discovery not user experience research. Our Clients Want Leads and Deals My clients come to me for help generating leads and closing deals, so that narrows my focus. We don’t …

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Customer Interviews: Spend an Hour to Save a Minute

For customer interviews we have a rule of thumb that if an hour or research saves a minute early in the conversation it’s a good investment.  When you look at the list of questions you have prepared to learn about the prospect’s business and their needs, it’s easy to say to yourself, “I am really …

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Minimum Viable Product: Enthusiastically Proceed Skeptically

In a candid discussion about the challenges of managing your own expectations for a minimum viable product (MVP), Tristan Kromer observed, “It’s psychologically hard to enthusiastically proceed with skepticism.” And that is the challenge, we have to be enthusiastic about our product ideas to persevere to complete them and tell others about them, but we have to …

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David Binetti On The Mind of the Entrepreneur

In the mind of the entrepreneur the future is obvious and imminent. This  “reality distortion field” can be useful for making a better future possible, but it inclines the entrepreneur to minimize adoption risk–people will see the benefits of my product immediately and adopt it–and to be impatient. Customer development techniques allow you to identify expensive …

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A Conversation With Tristan Kromer on B2B vs. B2C Customer Acquisition Challenges

Direct download from http://traffic.libsyn.com/skmurphy/Tristan_Sean_6-13-14b.mp3 Here is a rough transcript of the first five minutes or so to give you a flavor, I think you will find it interesting if you are wrestling with customer development or customer validation in an early market: Sean: I am sitting here today with Tristan Kromer, we are going to …

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We Help Teams of Experts Find Leads and Close Deals

If you have demonstrated domain knowledge and expertise, a plan for having a significant impact on a customer problem, and are in the process of exploring the early market for your offering or trying to build on a handful of early customers, we can help find leads and close deals. The majority of our clients …

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Tristan Kromer: You Can Tell a Good Advisor by Their Questions

Three interesting answers from Tristan Kromer’s interview with the folks at Startup Commons Startup Commons: What’s the best way to get started? Tristan Kromer:  Find someone you really want to help. Someone in pain. That’s your vision. Helping someone and solving a real problem. Find team members with complementary skill sets who are able to challenge …

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Q: We Already Have a Prototype, Can We Still Do Customer Development?

Product-market fit is not a ratchet: competitive response, new entrants, changes in technology and customer preference require ongoing customer development. You will need to continue to do customer development–and customer discovery for that matter–even after you have a first prototype, an MVP, early customers, and an established niche. Markets and competitors don’t stand still, no …

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What is Lean? Lean Innovation 101 on May 27, 2014

Sean Murphy is honored to speak at Linked CXO Forum on Tuesday, May 27th, 2014 at Haworth Showroom in San Francisco, California. Linked CXO provides networking for senior executives – “Bosses Need Professional Development, Too.” “Lean” provides a scientific approach for creating a product and developing new businesses. Teams can build products or services to …

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