The four are:

• The renaissance salesperson – He or she can sell a sno-cone to an Eskimo; they don’t need no stinkin’ customer development.
• If you build-it, they will come Engineers – Our product rocks, therefore we win.
• Madison Ave marketers – All we need is some advertising, PR, branding — mix in a little social media marketing, and you’re good to go!
• The “you don’t get it” entrepreneur – If you don’t see the billion dollar win the CEO sees, you simply lack the vision.  See?

I think I’ve met one of each in the last week. This is why I’m so perplexed by this recent Steve Blank comment:

Entrepreneurs who have a startup or two under their belt tend to rattle off preliminary customer findings and data that blow me away (not because I think their data is going to be right, but because it means they have built a process for learning and discovery from day one.)

(emphasis mine)

If only it were true!

In my experience, the more things change, the more they remain the same.   VCs want a proven CEO.  The CEO hires a familiar exec team.  The execs practice the same principles they always have in order to meet expectations set by a business plan written with hockey stick revenues based on market research designed to prove assumptions, rather than test them.

Please, re-read that paragraph and tell me if it’s not true.

Customer development isn’t (just) about solving a startup problem.  Steve’s SuperMac problem was and is, I believe, emblematic of the standard operating procedure of many if not most small to medium sized high tech businesses today.   In 2001, it was popular to blame  the Internet bubble on the 20 or 30-something year old CEOs, who were purportedly leading the financial system into believing in exorbitant valuations based on fluff.  When stated that way, the absurdity of the belief is plain to see.  The 40 and 50+ year old VCs, financial analysts, investment bankers, et. al., were at least as much to blame for not only convincing the “youngsters” that scale before profits was totally cool, but also seasoned and noob investors around the world!  In a similar vein, the reluctance to “fail fast” — to look boldly at the real market viability of a particular capital investment — is an institutional failure, not merely a misunderstanding by a green CEO.

I blather on about this because, to be melodramatic about it, the future of “customer development” and “lean startup” is dependent upon it being recognized as a solvent for a core failure in the present system at all levels, not just with pre-VC startups.   Otherwise, the terminology is easily co-opted, as some have claimed has happened to the agile development movement. It’s possible that the customer development movement will be relegated to a segment that “doesn’t get it” and so needs to go back to school, rather than as is really the case in my opinion, to the industry as a whole, whose members (generally) don’t get it and need to adapt.

So finally, we come to the 5th archetype:  those which provide the means of co-opting customer development so as to render it meaningless, by way of the “we already do it” archetype.  These are the people who talk to customers for market research.  They “wow” us with their user stories, case studies, and focus groups results.

I recently spoke with a company who were looking for some traditional demand generation marketing to fill their pipeline.   Some of the execs had read or heard of Steve Blank (great!), who were interested in MVP (woo hoo!), and they had sold some product, but hadn’t found the sweet spot in the marketplace that would enable their product to take off.  They were all for iterative learning about who their right customers are and how to sell to them and they hadn’t yet rolled out a nationwide sales force.  I was impressed.  They practiced customer development.  Right?

The late arriving nugget most telling was, however, that their prospect database that was filled with hundreds of leads, all of whom had directly expressed interest, many of whom had even tested the product in a formal “proof of concept,” yet had not purchased product!

Why?

Old way:  Wrong marketing.  Fire sales or marketing.  Fill pipeline (ie, database) with new leads.

New way: Call every customer in the database and interview them.

1) The Renaissance Salesperson  — This individual can sell anything to anyone, e.g., ice to an Eskimo, water to a drowning man, aluminum siding to a brick house owner.  The quintessential salesperson, as depicted in Tin Men, Glengarry Glen Ross, et. al., is driven by the confidence that despite all odds, he or she can close.   Product is merely a milestone in order fulfillment.

Quote:

After selling vaporware for 25 years for large vendors like Oracle & Peoplesoft, believe me, I can sell this…

These highly successful sales people turned CEOs sell their trackrecord to raise funds, an exercise deemed a necessary evil to afford hiring the sales team.  This path is clearly fraught with danger.  Ethics aside, it’s one thing for a billion dollar company to promise first and deliver later and quite another for a startup to depend on these tactics to get going.

2) Speak-softly and carry a big Product — This individual believes product development solves market shortcomings.  There is at least some altruism here, in that these individuals believe in building high-quality products that customers want.  Unfortunately, the believe system is often typified by the “if we build it they will come” mentality, whereby products are magically discovered by their customers through the luminance of their high-quality sheen.  Quote:

We can provide the depth of content Google can’t.

In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner had a magic spirit or baseball god to ensure the players indeed came.  This tactic may work for you, too, assuming you have a marketing god filling the stadium for you.

3) Madison Avenue Marketer — These people recognize that a “Field of Dreams” is pipe-driven. Their answer: a really big megaphone.    In the past, this has meant heavy advertising and lots of PR, topped off with, perhaps a Superbowl ad.  While this method might be right for some (Go-Daddy comes to mind), for most startups, not so much.

These days most startups won’t get enough funding to take this tact, but there’s a smaller version that is equally pernicious. Quote:

What we need to do is create a blog, a Facebook fan page, keep the updated, tweet, max-out SEO, create backlinks, etc., and make as big a splash as possible.  It’s not cheap.

This strategy reminds me of the movie, Wag the Dog, where a political spin-doctor teams with a Hollywood producer to create a false war to distract the population from other matters.   While the analogy doesn’t exactly fit, the creation of a huge spectacle is really a marketing strategy and anytime you are attracting attention you are necessarily distracting, as well.  The point to startups is : 1st) The attraction/distraction are typically transient in nature, even if you have the money to sustain the programs; 2nd) While “wagging the dog” is a purposeful diversion to hide something, “wagging the startup” results in internal diversion away from what you should be doing.  What if your buyer doesn’t tweet or read blogs?

(See Steve Blank’s market type discussions to learn when a big megaphone might be the right approach.)

4) You Can’t Handle the Truth! — I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the most difficult predicaments for entrepreneurs is handling the truth that a market doesn’t exist.  If  you don’t want to hear the answer, don’t ask the question.  In “A Few Good Men,” Lt. Kafee asks the question.

Denial is a powerful human defense mechanism.  Rationalization protects the denial.  Quotes:

The answer was close enough, I phrased the question wrong.
You don’t get it.
All my friends say I’ve nailed it.
They don’t realize they need it yet.
I only need 1% and that’s a no-brainer.
I’d pay for it.  There’s gotta be lots like me.
It makes too much sense.
Their boss will make them buy it.
…

The passion that drives entrepreneurship often hides blind spots.   The point is not to not “go for it,” but rather to make “going for it” refer to proving the market exists, rather than assuming a market exists and building a business based on untested assumptions.

*****

I’m sure there are plenty more, but these are the most typical anti-lean startup archetypes I encounter.  These people don’t necessarily overtly reject continuous deployment, minimum viable product, or customer development, but rather mentally morph the concepts to fit into their existing beliefs of how things “should be done.”  Truth be told, I even recognize some of these traits in myself!

What about you?  Have you encountered these?  Do you recognize yourself in any of these archetypes?  How have you overcome them?