Comments (3)

By brantcooper, February 3, 2010 12:10 pm

Because of the overwhelming response and great feedback for the the Customer Development image I recently shared, I decided to share another from our upcoming book. Please let me know what you think.

Figure 2. Ries' Lean Startup: Customer and product development interrelatedness

*CPS = Customer-Problem-Solution

As shown in Figure 2, customer development and product development are two distinct, but interrelated and iterative processes. As Eric Ries describes, the Customer Development team works on testing the problem-customer-solution assumptions, while the Product Development team tackles the solution.  The product development process receives input from customers indirectly through customer development, and (in the web world) directly through measurement of product usage.  The product development process actively iterates on the product, releasing new or different functionality directly to the customer as quickly as possible.

The customer development process receives input from customers indirectly through product development reports on feature usage, but also directly from customer development processes and analytics.  The customer development process iterates on core business assumptions, product functionality, and acquisition and conversion assumptions, resulting in updated hypotheses, honed messaging, positioning, marketing tactics, and feature requirements.

In the Customer Discovery context, a lean startup is not one that necessarily uses lean manufacturing precepts per se, but rather one that uses fast, iterative development practices in conjunction with customer development methodologies in order to:

1)       Validate core hypotheses (customer-problem-solution),

2)       Produce an MVP,

3)       Achieve Product-Market fit,

4)       Produce a development and marketing roadmap for scaling.

Creating a proper iteration loop requires you to predefine success and failure for each stage, and a means to measure your progress.  For example, in the web-based world, Dave McClure’s AARRR metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) might be applied to measure the stages from concept to product-market fit.

(BTW, if you are interested in being notified when the book is published, sign up here.)

Comments (12)

By Patrick Vlaskovits, January 3, 2010 9:12 am

Success and Cognitive Bias

One thing that often strikes me about conversations regarding start-up success is the pervasiveness of the narrative fallacy and hindsight bias.

We can go to Wikipedia’s entry on Taleb for a definition:

Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have an identifiable cause.

Allow me to illustrate.  What caused YouTube to grow at phenomenal rates in 2005/2006, eventually leading to a $1.65 billion acquisition by Google in 2006?

Was the cause:
Continue reading 'Cognitive Biases, Positive Black Swan Events and Startups'»

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 (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 (2)

By brantcooper, August 20, 2009 2:20 pm

Unlike my classmates who headed to Silicon Valley from UC Davis upon graduation, I moved to Washington DC to work for a defense consulting firm. After a couple of years, “I dropped out” to write a novel, which I subsequently finished, explored the country for 3 months, finally landing in San Francisco and beginning my career in technology.

My book was (is) trite and sophomoric. After all, what insights do most 20-somethings have worth sharing? A lack of experience — a lack of failure — makes pontification shallow. One of my younger brothers, who was trying to make a living as a painter at the time, had a great comment. He said that he felt my book, like his art, was merely trying to say too much. That it wasn’t that we didn’t have good things to say, but that there was lack of discipline in focusing and examining in greater depth a few ideas, rather than “letting it all hang out.”

I think young entrepreneurs suffer from a similar malady. Continue reading 'Customer Development Presentation'»