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By brantcooper, January 12, 2011 11:31 am

I had a brief email conversation with a startup founder struggling with how to tackle customer development in marketplace business models.  I thought I’d share a bit about what we discussed, in case others have a similar dilemma.

Customer Development does not equal User Acquisition

Customer development is a method for discovering, testing and validating user acquisition and conversion methods.  So that a marketplace suffers from the “Chicken and Egg” problem, i.e., there’s only a true market when they’re both there doesn’t affect Customer Discovery and some amount of Customer Validation.  In other words, you can interview both sides of the market place, show them solution ideas, validate MVP features all without the other side of the marketplace being involved at all.

The pre-development signal you are trying to hone in on is “What will it take minimally for each side of the equation to come to the market?”  In most marketplaces, what you will discover is that one side of the market is actually the product, and the other side is the consumer of the product.

Product vs Consumer

In truth, the “Chicken and Egg” problem doesn’t exist.  I hate to burst your object impermanence bubble, but your local weekend farmer’s market exists even when you don’t go.  ; )  Marketplaces can exist with products, but no customers — just not for long.  One side creates the marketplace, i.e., is the “product”; the other side creates the market, i.e., is the consumer of the product.

To put it another way, the business doesn’t exist without product, but doesn’t succeed without customers.  (Exists, but fails.)   In the groupon example, clearly coupons are the product.  (Groupon doesn’t exist without coupons, Groupon doesn’t succeed without consumers.)  A client of mine had photographers on one side of a marketplace business model and people who need custom photos on the other.  The business doesn’t exist without photographers; doesn’t succeed without people buying photos.

Marketplace User Acquisition

The “Chicken and Egg” dilemma does (potentially) exist, when it comes to converting prospects into customers or users.  ”Network Effect” businesses have a great potential to grow virally  if they nail their value prop, but need the effect to get the effect!  Some marketplaces suffer from the same dilemma: there’s no value to either side until both sides are there and engaged.

BTW, Customer Development doesn’t have a specific process that will instruct you how to get both sides to your product and get them engaged.  Customer Discovery will not tell you how to solve the acquisition and retention chicken/egg problem.  Is this the much-ballyhooed Customer Development “Fallacy?”  (I don’t get what the fallacy is supposed to be.) Like most aspects of building a business, you won’t find an answer in a book.  You actually have to try methods others have used or think up some new ones and SEE WHAT WORKS.

• Namesake has done a good job using a velvet-rope strategy to test, validate and grow its network effect.  They carefully invite early-adopter types to ensure that site activity is consistent and of decent quality so that there is something for new users to engage with;
• Use a tight geographic approach to control environment;
• You have to get product to market, so make it dead simple for the product side of your marketplace to engage.  Not just cheap (or free, initially), but simple. Do the work for them if you must.

I hope you find this helpful!

Comments (6)

By brantcooper, September 13, 2010 4:38 pm

I received a comment on the “Art of Customer Development Conversation” post regarding B2B Customer Development conversations and specifically, “how to navigate complicated customers where you’ll ultimately need approval from 3-5 parties while dealing with motivated saboteurs.”

The number one problem with Customer Development in B2B environments is that startups begin the Customer Development process too late.  The revenue plan has been sold to the board, the product is done or near-done, and a marketing launch date has been chosen.  Despite the increasing popularity of the LeanStartup “movement,” this is, IMO, still standard operating procedure for most B2B startups.  So having skipped Customer Discovery entirely, the company founders have neither validated their problem assumptions nor their proposed solution.  The board eagerly awaits first revenue and to that end, will even help hire the first VP of Sales in order to accomplish this momentous milestone of best-laid plans.

Welcome to the maze of complex B2B sales.  Did you think B2B sales was going to be straightforward; based solely on rational, business-savvy calculations?  Based on the bottom-line?  Most everyone recognizes that the B2C sales process requires appealing to consumer’s emotions.  But believe it or not, business buyers, influencers and users are human, too, and thus are not-exempt from emotional decision making.  Ego, hierarchy, competitiveness, fear, grandstanding, sycophantry join budget, market share, revenue, profits, risk, time, resources in the sale.

The “Status Quo Coefficient” represents that which you must overcome above and beyond the pain your product solves, in order to make a sale.

Pre-Launch Customer Development

If you are practicing Customer Development prior to product launch, then Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany goes into great detail about how to discover and validate your understanding of the complex selling environment.  In less detail, but perhaps with more specific tactics, Vlaskovits and my The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development is a good resource for executing your Customer Discovery plan.

During Customer Discovery, you are not selling, so you are in a better situation to have “learning conversations” with prospective customers.  Your aim is to establish relationships inside businesses who are likely to be early adopters.  This means you must find your champion.  Your champion will help you understand who your saboteurs are and hopefully, how to navigate around them.  As you build your product and validate your vision with the champion, you empower him or her to sell you inside the organization.

Post-Launch Customer Development

These are tricky waters for the reasons described above.  If you have a sales team in the field, let them go.  If you have a VP of Sales unable to take a learning approach, let him or her go.  If you are fortunate to have a board that has bought into learning before (large scale) selling, perhaps you are able to hire a VP of Customer Development or utilize outside resources.

In 2005, Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway wrote a very #custdev-y paper, called the Enterprise Sales Learning Curve (.doc).  Leslie and Hollow describe the same failures of scaling sales and marketing prior to knowing how market and sell that led Blank to establish the Customer Development methodology.  I highly recommend this paper for B2B startup executives and investors.

Leslie and Holloway advocate hiring a “Renaissance” Sales person to practice Customer Discovery:

The “Renaissance” Sales Rep:    During the initiation phase we would like to hire an individual who is able to facilitate broad based learning by the enterprise.  This individual likely has a deep interest in the technology and in bringing together various customer departments with the appropriate representatives of the company.  The individual is extremely resourceful, able to develop his / her own sales model and collateral materials as needed.

Fundamentally, two approaches exist no matter who you bring on board:  1) go back to Discovery or 2) establish a painstaking process for winning your first five deals.  For a peek out how this approach might be developed, I highly recommend you read this comprehensive interview with Sean Murphy.

So what is it exactly, that you need to learn?

1) Validate Customer-Problem-Solution: No matter what stage your company is in, you need to validate that you have the right combination.

2) Do you have the “whole product?”  Or do you need partners, systems integrators, etc.

3) Identify the buyer’s process and corresponding business tactics.

4) Identify all the player’s in the process: user, influencers, economic buyers, decision makers.

5) What messaging and positioning messages resonate?

6) What does the corporate purchasing process look like?

Non product-specific answers you need:

Are you the decision maker?

Do you have budget?

Who also is involved in decision making?

Is this deal subject to other departments’ approval processes?

Are there compliance issues regarding this deal?

Can legal or purchasing nix the deal?

Do you keep a list of approved resellers/systems integrators?

Are there departments who might disapprove of a deal (are you adversely affecting another department’s budget)?

All things considered, what is the “typical” length of the approval process?

What other user groups/departments will benefit from a deal?

Will a successful pilot assuage naysayers?

Will you sign a contract whereby you purchase upon a successful pilot?

************

The method for obtaining this information doesn’t change significantly between pre- and post- product Customer Development:  You must establish deep relationships.  High-powered, “renaissance” sales people do this through “consultative” sales, whereby they learn what core problems the client needs solving and how they can work together to implement product that does the job.  Either way, you must find an internal champion and developing this relationship is typically a painstaking process that takes months to evolve.

The best way to find internal champions is through your network, no further than 1 link away (i.e., friends of friends).  This means reaching out to the friends, family, and colleagues of you and your co-founders, employees, board members, mentor, advisers, etc., for introductions.

As discussed in The Art of Customer Development Conversations, the answers you seek are not often the result of direct questions, but flow from conversations that grow deeper over time as the fit between problem and solution becomes tighter and trust among principals builds.

Comments (7)

By brantcooper, September 2, 2010 9:52 am

By now all Lean Startup and Customer Development practitioners should know that if you’re not getting out of the building, you’re not doing Customer Development. Each of the following, while often a necessary and beneficial activity, does not constitute Customer Development:

• surveys
• automated customer feedback mechanisms (e.g., uservoice, get satisfaction, et. al.)
• embedded product use analytics
• marketing analytics
• feature request mechanisms
• sales calls
• product demo
• usability testing
• focus groups

Each has its place in the Customer Development process, but without live Customer Development Conversations, you are likely compromising your ability to learn your way to Product-Market fit or startup scaling.  What you seek to learn evolves over time, as do the tactics you employ, but every step of the way should be grounded in real time conversations.

Generally speaking:

Pre-Problem-Solution Fit, you concentrate on learning as much as you can about the problem, who are the real customers (user? buyer? boss?), and possible solutions.

Pre-Minimum Viable Product, you concentrate of learning, developing and testing the minimum features and functionality required o solve the problem to a degree the customer will buy.

Pre-Product-Market Fit, you concentrate on learning about funnels, testing messaging and positioning, and likely iterating on product and market segment in search of P-M fit.

The conversation itself is difficult for many. The key to effective conversations is in developing the conversation around your objectives for the discussion.  Establish 3 or 4 “must learns” for each conversation.  Depending on what you’re trying to learn, you can use “open-ended” questions and direct questions.  Use your conversations to calibrate your other tactics.  Are you asking the right questions in your surveys?  Do responses gibe?  Are product demos necessary from the buyer’s perspective?   Are users using the product the way they say they want to?

I thought I’d share some recent experiences my clients have had with customer development conversations to help illustrate conversation tactics.

1. Talk problem first, not solution.

Client: “I can’t stop talking about the solution.  It’s how the conversation starts.”

Clearly, whenever you meet someone for the first time, you need to introduce the space your product is in.  You must provide a context for the conversation.   You need to be able to state what you’re about succinctly, so you can move on to the purpose of the meeting.  Otherwise, you spend the whole time trying to explain what you’re doing.  This is why the elevator pitch is so important.   In a conversation, you don’t necessarily repeat the pitch verbatim, but you use components of it to steer the conversation.  So, for example, if you are testing your problem assumptions, use a classic sales cold call method of “flipping” the conversation from talking about yourself (solution) to the customer (problem):

Hi, I’m Brant Cooper from Market By Numbers, and I teach Founders Customer Development principles to help get their startups off the ground; (intro that provides context)

I often hear from startup CEOs like yourself, (The Flip)

That they have trouble figuring out how to prove their business model and how to prioritize what they should be working on; (problem hypotheses)

Do you experience this at all? (Open ended question)

Follow up questions depend on the answer.  If answer is no, you might say: “That’s great, it sounds like you have things under control. “What are the primary issues you face as CEO?” or “Do you hear other CEOs that talk about these issues?”

2. Except when that doesn’t work.

Client: “I couldn’t get her to describe her pain.  She kept wanting to know how she could help me!”

The contact was a senior person in the exact type of company needed to confirm a key hypothesis.  My solution would help her company’s relationship with its clients, but I couldn’t get her to talk about that.  Instead, she talked about problems her clients had and the opportunities available to solve them.  I asked if she was a sales person and it turns out she was.    I said it sounds like she’s a good sales person, who understands the needs of her clients, and a good contact, but not his customer. I suggested my client ask her to refer him to her company’s product managers who would be more likely to be interested in his ideas.  “More contacts to speak with” should always be a core objective.

If a problem statement doesn’t resonate, either your problem statement is not articulated correctly, is flat out wrong, or you are not talking to the your customer.

3. This is not feature mongering.

Client: “Conversation inevitably turns to features discussion.”

If you are talking about features, see 1. above.  If your contact or customer is talking features, slow it down by by asking why.  Use the same 5-whys approach Eric Ries talks about to discover a problem in your development process to figure out what is driving the feature request.  Continue to ask why the customer wants specific functionality until they are able to tell you the actual problem they’re trying to solve.  This helps you consider a couple of things.  First, is the feature a high priority to the customer?  Second, are you building the right Minimum Viable Product?  Obviously, one data point is not enough to draw conclusions, but it contributes to the analysis.

4. How to test messaging.

Client: “Can’t I just A/B test?”

It’s fine to use split testing to test messaging, but it’s most effective when you’re optimizing your funnel. If you do it too early, you actually don’t know if you are optimizing for the right product and market.  Also, you can find out that one message works better than another, but you can’t learn why.  In a live conversation, not only can you ask why a message doesn’t work, but you can test several iterations in the same conversation.   When testing messages live, I like to use the “pause method.”

5. Ask them.

Client: “Everyone says I need Facebook, Twitter, a blog.  How do I know?”

If there are two things the world doesn’t need more of, they are Internet Marketers and Social Media Gurus. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement and clearly Internet and social media marketing can be effective.  But their effectiveness depends less on which expert you hire than whether your customer and their buying process intersect with your online tactics.  I spoke with a CEO recently who had two B2B deals in pilot for his new startup.  He had personally orchestrated the sales process through 1-1 relationship building in a carefully honed market segment. Yet his marketing plan called for Internet and social media marketing that didn’t jive with his experience.  He immediately described a shotgun approach to figure out what the right online channels would be.  While it might be the case that online marketing would be successful and even necessary to scale, at that time all evidence pointed to offline methods.  Using the “Flipping the Funnel” idea, I recommended he Ask his existing customers!  Here’s a question you can ask straight out to your contacts:  Do you belong to social networks?  Do influence your buying decisions? What blogs do you read, etc.

I hope you find this helpful.  What issues do you encounter during your Customer Development Conversations?

Comments (5)

By brantcooper, July 28, 2010 7:36 pm

Now a couple of days away from the Lean Startup Machine startup weekend, I wanted to get down some initial thoughts on the event.  When approached about participating in the event, I was immediately intrigued by the idea, as long as it took the lean startup principles seriously.  Much to their credit, organizers Trevor Owens, Ben Fisher and Kyle Kelly were open to any and all ideas to make the event conform to Lean Startup and customer development principles.  And much to Eric Ries‘ credit, he threw his support behind the idea once such conformity was demonstrated.  Still, this was an experiment.

The more one adopts these principles, the more one can find ways to adopt them in all areas of life — they become “meta,” as Patrick Vlaskovits would say — and this event was no exception.  It was Lean Startup Machine’s Minimum Viable Product.

By all accounts (that I’ve heard), the event was a rousing success.  Here are some more or less random thoughts about the weekend, some of which I hope to cover in more depth soon:

1) I’m blown away by the people who attended: smart, opinionated, creative, dedicated team-players with some really interesting ideas.  And they all want to be startup founders.  Many will scoff at whether this is a good thing or not, but I think it’s great.

2) Customer Development is a great conflict resolution tool.  When you reach a loggerhead, formulate opposing opinions as hypotheses and go test them.

3) While there was reluctance among some and a few Engineers stayed inside completely, whole teams hit the streets of NYC to engage customers.  It was awesome to see!  I can’t wait for the video.

4) Clearly enterprise B2B ideas are at a disadvantage when it comes to weekend customer development.  But B2C rocked it and B2SMB took advantage of New York’s vast number of local businesses.

5) Good team balance was essential.  Those teams with naturally social members kicked customer development butt.  People were making phone calls to business owners across the country, setting up Craigslist ads, conducting surveys, interviewing by telephone and pounding the pavement for person-to-person discussions.  There was more combined customer development in one weekend than most startups do in a year!

6) Customer Development is hard.  Several assumptions were crushed over the weekend and for the more brutal failings, there were no easy follow on steps.  It’s one thing for a market segment to fail, it’s another when a core idea is roundly  rejected.  But it happened.   It’s easy to become demoralized by negative validation, but the teams pressed on.

7) We saw some amazing pivots, product mockups that reflected the changes, and then customer validation of the pivots!  That’s pretty amazing for a weekend’s work.

8 ) Some people had a tough time understanding the difference between seeking evidence for their idea and testing their assumptions.

9) This event has great potential.  There were some rough spots, but no major problems and the learning that went on was tremendous.

10) It will be interesting to hear more feedback, but my general impression is that this was the first real encounter with customer development for most of the participants and that the experience they gained was invaluable.  My belief is that to truly grok customer development, you must “get a win;” meaning you need to experience first hand the empowerment that comes from customer validated ideas.  I think we had a lot of that!

If there’s something in particular you’d like to hear more about the weekend, please let me know in comments.