Comments (1)

By Patrick Vlaskovits, December 22, 2009 10:38 am

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 be interesting to see a little detail about who is involved with Customer Development. You can see those results here.

While the survey results add a bit of color to who is implementing Customer Development methodologies or thinking about doing Customer Development, I wouldn’t draw any hard conclusions from the data.  BTW for the those who read 4 Steps to the Epiphany, n ≈ 33.  For those who didn’t read 4 Steps to the Epiphany, n ≈ 28.

Second, we are thinking about tools, templates, and other resources to help people understand and implement Customer Development in their business ventures. Stay tuned, for in the coming months, we plan to make some of these resources available to you.

Almost forgot!  Our two winners of the random raffle are: Dave Concannon and Kevin Donaldson.

Thanks again to everyone.  Happy holidays!

Comments (5)

By brantcooper, December 18, 2009 12:11 pm

Thanks to all who have filled out the survey. I thought it would be fun to share some of the results!

(Updated 12/22/09: for those interested, the survey is still open, but the raffle is over.

==> I have read Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

==> I have not read (or not finished) Steve Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

All personal information will be kept private.)

______________________________________

Now to some results.
Continue reading 'State of Customer Development (Part II)'»

Comments (3)

By brantcooper, December 16, 2009 9:44 pm

When I first started blogging about Customer Development, last February, I felt like there were only a handful of people talking about it.  I’m sure that’s just a matter of perception.  The likes of Sean Ellis, Sean Murphy, Nivi at VentureHacks, Dave McClure, Hiten at KissMetrics, and Eric Ries had already thinking and blogging about it for many months (years?) before.

By March it was clear to me I had stumbled across something that was catching on.  It’s not insignificant that Twitter had just reached its “tipping point.”  Customer Development would ride the wave.  I first learned the value of Twitter through the promotion of great posts written by start-up superstars, many of which contained elements of customer development.  Rich Collins created the Lean Startup Google Group in June and it quickly grew to a couple hundred members.  There are now over 1700 members!

All of which leads me to this question, done in full cliche-riddled, end-of-2009, year-in-review regalia:

What is the State of Customer Development?

Continue reading 'The State of Customer Development'»

Comments (10)

By Patrick Vlaskovits, December 15, 2009 1:27 pm

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 “get out of the building” demands that you listen to customers, but not that you necessarily heed what they say! You may have the wrong customer for your business. You may have the right customer who emphasizes the wrong root cause to a problem. As I tweeted the other day:

maybe your product focus should be what your current customers don’t ask for or what your lost customers wanted.

I invited “CustDevGuy,” author of the “Fake Screenshot/LOI” customer development case study, to write up a continuation of that story, which illustrates an easy trap to fall into when interacting with potential customers. Here’s his story:

——————————————————–

Hi there.

This guest-post is a follow-up to my original Case Study posted at the Lean Startup Circle.  (Thanks Brant for lending me your digital soapbox.)  I wanted to further flesh out an important insight that came out of conversations about my ongoing Customer Development experiences as well as address a common fallacy that keeps popping up in conversations and email threads with regards to what Customer Development is and isn’t.  The fallacy being that customers will simply hand over the Holy Grail (read: Product/Market Fit) if you go and chat a bit with them.
Continue reading 'Seller Beware: Customers Have Their Own Agenda'»

Comments (8)

By brantcooper, December 8, 2009 10:10 pm

For some reason, I’ve always wanted to try and put Steve Blank’s Customer Development, Eric Ries’ Lean Startup and Dave McClure’s AARRR[G] in one slide.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Is this at all helpful? Let me know if you have any suggestions or comments.