Trajectory by Dave Parker

Author:Dave Parker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781953295149
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2021-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

CUSTOMER DEVELOPMENT

Customer development is a core learning of the Lean Startup movement. Though it was first presented by Steve Blank, it was popularized by Eric Ries with The Lean Startup. The basic premise of customer development is to get out of the building and ask your potential customers what they actually want in the product that you are building.

But let’s back up and start earlier in the process, before you have a thousand people visiting your site every day. You’re at the ideation stage or pre-revenue. You want to do a startup, but before you start building and testing you can (and I would argue should) ask yourself a set of questions.

Customer development is the scientific and systematic process of discovering if your target customer actually cares about the product you are thinking of building. There has been some great work done in customer development in the past; I want to recap some of those resources here and draw some further distinctions of areas where you can find answers before you actually spend any money on a prototype.

Steve Blank’s article and follow-up book “The Four Steps of an Epiphany,” and the definitive startup work with Bob Dorf in 2012’s The Startup Owner’s Manual, captures Blank’s early work on customer development that he began in the 1990s. Lean LaunchPad is a class that he started at Stanford and UC Berkeley in 2011. The Four Steps to the Epiphany are:

1.Customer discovery

2.Customer validation

3.Customer creation

4.Company building

The first two have been practically combined and become customer development. Blank’s idea is that customer interactions drive the behavior of the product-development model. This is the opposite of what often happens, which is the product team proceeds as if it knows what the customer wants and can’t be bothered with interviewing the customers to validate the idea. This view is sometimes expressed when a very “smart” founder quotes Henry Ford’s famous quip, “If I asked the customer what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” This is usually the same founder who has “Visionary Entrepreneur” on their LinkedIn profile. If that is you, please go change your profile right now. You don’t get to call yourself a visionary entrepreneur until you do something amazing.

Alexander Osterwalder’s book Business Model Generation and business model canvas is a great way to outline and test your hypothesis because of the interrelated parts. The components of the canvas are:

•Key partners

•Key activities

•Key resources

•Value propositions

•Customer relationships

•Channels

•Customer segments

•Cost structure

•Revenue streams

We used the business model canvas extensively as a tool when we launched the first version of Startup Next in 2011/2012. The BMC works well in larger organizations that have existing resources and are considering how to validate or create new innovations for an existing customer base.

Customer development never stops for your business. You always have a hypothesis that you want to test.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.