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:
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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.
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