Customer Development Is Not Just For Startups
Customer development is not just for startups. We have Fortune 500 clients launching new products who rely on customer development methods.
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Startup Stages
Zoom In For Traction, Zoom Out For Impact
Your startup is a work in progress. When most entrepreneurs evaluate where they are it’s difficult not to include the promising future they foresee naturally ensuing from current efforts (or on bad days the certain doom no matter what they do). If you are not getting traction, if you don’t have the ability to reliably
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Better Interfaces: Interview, Treemap, Tornado Chart
Innovative user interfaces have helped a number of products get adopted. These are three examples–interview, treemap, and tornado chart–may help to stimulate your thinking.
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Pictures Are to Words as Conversations are to Surveys
You waste time and reputation using these methods for B2B customer discovery: surveys, landing pages, and asking for endorsement before product experience.
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Perfectionism vs. Mastery
Perfectionism vs. Mastery Mastery’s great accomplishments require time and a willingness to release a sequence of prototypes. Perfectionism means you don’t ship until it’s perfect. Which means you never ship or what you ship has not learned from problems or needs that only visible post deployment. Randall Munroe’s “The General Problem” embeds this observation: “I
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Customer Interviews: Allow Yourself to Be Surprised
A few thoughts on customer interviews and why their capacity to surprise us makes them preferable to surveys and landing pages for early market exploration.
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Stay Tuned! We Are Being Purposefully Vague Right Now
I came across an interesting tool this week in the collaboration area. The web page invited me to apply for membership, prompting me to enter my e-mail, twitter handle, blog, and a brief bio. But they were “purposefully vague’ about who they were. It wasn’t exactly stealth mode, more like maintaining deniability if it failed
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What Happens When The “Come As You Are Party” is Over
A bootstrapped startup is a “come as you are” party. The Founders rely on passion and their savings to build product and find customers.
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Tips for B2B Customer Development Interviews
This post on customer development interviews is one of my most popular. If you would like help preparing for customer development interviews or reviewing results from recent interviews please sign up for a no cost no obligation office hours session and I will be happy to help you rehearse or de-brief. Here are my lessons learned from taking
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Purpose, Patience, Politeness, and Prudent Risk Taking
A bootstrapper needs four attributes to succeed: purpose, patience, politeness, and prudent risk taking. These are markers for strength not weakness.
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Appreciative Inquiry Mindset Essential to Customer Discovery
Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is a mindset that is essential in customer discovery. It encourages you to look for what’s working in an potential customer’s organization and “work with the grain of the wood.” It enables you to build on demonstrated strengths and accomplishments in framing your solution to a critical business problem.
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Customer Development Conversations With Busy Prospects
Question from an entrepreneur in the midst of customer discovery for a new product. Q: We are preparing to launch our first product in a few months. Next week there is a conference sponsored by a professional society that represents one of our potential target markets. We have already done about a dozen customer discovery
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Learning From Netflix: Lenny Greenberg’s Response
Lenny Greenberg, Founder and CTO of Assistyx, e-mailed me a long and thoughtful response to my “Learning from Netflix” post.
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It’s the Picture on the Box that Sells the LEGO Set
It’s the Picture on the Box that Sells the LEGO Set: provide specific examples of how your product can be used to solve problems.
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Selling to a Business Requires Conversations that Build Trust
Selling to a businesses requires conversations that build trust. Trust is built over time from predictability and meeting commitments.
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Cutting Your Teeth in Sales
If you are an entrepreneur then sales is always a part of your responsibility. Here are some tips for cutting your teeth in sales.
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Gauging Customer Commitment
There are many useful ways to measure customer commitment to your product. Here is a rubric to help you assess each of your customers.
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Successful Entrepreneurship Is Ongoing Self-Improvement
Three variations on the idea that “successful entrepreneurship is an ongoing self-improvement” project, program, or process.
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Refine and Curate Your Thoughts as FAQs, Articles, and Talks
Refine and curate your thoughts by reworking the first draft of your answers in an email or in response to a question from a customer or an audience member at a talk.
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The Risk of General Purpose Toolkits as a First Product
Successful general purpose toolkits evolve from successful simple point tools. Focus, start small, and evolve into a broad platform.
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