Comments (1)

By Patrick Vlaskovits, April 29, 2010 1:11 pm

Brant and I have finally finished our book, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development:  A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany, within which we have included interviews from successful entrepreneurs in order see if their startup experiences mesh well with Brant’s and my interpretation of and experiences with Customer Development.  (I won’t beat around the bush, while our interviewees may not have called it Customer Development per se, they certainly practiced elements of what Steve Blank has codified as Customer Development in almost all but name.  And without exception, they applied fierce and relentless skepticism to all aspects of their businesses.)

We’ve had the pleasure of speaking with Jeff Smith (Smule), Fabrice Grinda (Zyngy, OLX), Ranjith Kumaran (YouSendIt), and Bruce Moeller (DriveCam).  We’ve condensed their experiences into case studies which are featured in the book.  However, there was so much great material, we simply could not include all of it.  Therefore, I’d like to take this opportunity to share an insight that came out of our interview with Bruce that we found quite edifying, one that goes to the heart of the Customer Development methodologies.

Background:  DriveCam uses video technology, expert analysis and driver coaching to reduce claims costs and saves lives by improving the way people drive.  From the DriveCam website:

DriveCam’s palm-sized, exception based video event recorder is mounted on the windshield behind the rearview mirror and captures sights and sounds inside and outside the vehicle. Exceptional forces such as hard braking, swerving, collision, etc. cause the recorder to save critical seconds of audio and video footage immediately before and after the triggered event.

[Emphasis mine.]

Bruce shared an interesting story about how assumptions made in the lab, based on data and “sophisticated” math undertaken by “sophisticated” analysts, fared in the real world of cement mixer trucks.  Remember, the DriveCam device’s core feature is to record audio and video when triggered by exceptional forces such as swerving.  When DriveCam went after the cement mixer truck market, they calibrated their devices based on the assumption that cement mixers would flip only if subject to a large sideways g force.

Seems reasonable, right?  After all, cement mixers are big, heavy trucks, and not to mention, filled with, well, the eponymous cement.

Turns out, not so reasonable after all.

Bruce recounted that when one of their first customer’s cement mixer trucks flipped over, the DriveCam device had failed to record what had occurred and what may have caused the accident — the customer was irate and Bruce was more than a little embarrassed.

Turns out that (outside of the lab!) cement mixers trucks can flip at very low speeds (1-2 mph) while at normal g forces when encountering things in the chaos of the real world, very ordinary and common things such as soft road shoulders.  Bruce’s customer knew this and was counting on Bruce and the DriveCam team to know this as well.

Lesson learned:

“My philosophy is you don’t know what you don’t know and if you were ever right in a given moment, and if your guesses were ever true it would be serendipitous.  You must attack your assumptions at all times. My basic tenet: question yourself, because the world is ever-changing.”

-Bruce Moeller

For more insights that speak directly to the Customer Development processes, please purchase The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development:  A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

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 (6)

By brantcooper, June 4, 2009 4:37 pm

I love the work Eric Ries is doing with Lean Startup.  (IMO, coupled with an investment model where funds are predicated on implementation of lean startup principles and achieving specific customer development milestones #leanstartup could revolutionize the start-up and investment landscapes.)

Words are powerful and and the intent of catchy phrases can be lost when removed from their original context.  I brought this up before a few weeks back, when the “Fail Fast” meme was cruising through Twitter and among some cheerleaders, it seems, failing itself had become the best means to success, as if it were the end objective, as if tripping your way to finish line will ensure you are the winner.

So it goes, IMO, with this quote about the customer’s vision:

Early customers are often more visionary than the startup they work with for that product.

I’m not so sure.  Continue reading 'Who owns the vision?'»

Comments (9)

By brantcooper, April 28, 2009 10:35 am

Through the evolution of their start-ups, entrepreneurs will face many  inflection points, at which decisions made or not made will determine their future.   The painful truth is that a wrong turn may lead to its demise, whereas a right turn leads to another inflection point.

Relevant to ongoing discussions about Blank’s “Customer Development,” I wish to highlight a few of these “inflection points.”

The first step in Blank’s model is “Customer Discovery.”   This step seeks to answer this fundamental question: Continue reading 'Customer Development Gut Checks'»

Comments (0)

By brantcooper, March 24, 2009 10:01 pm

I am sensing marked uptake on the concept of conducting serious customer research in order to jump start high tech start-ups.  It’s about time. There’s definitely buzz building around Steve Blank’s customer development methodology.  Ego dictates that whatever you’re thinking about must be what the world is thinking about and to that, I plead guilty.

But I wrote a post about an iterative, process-oriented approach to high-tech sales and marketing on 2.9.9.   Shortly thereafter, Andrew Beinbrink, CEO of the interesting San Diego start-up SportsTV, introduced me to Seal Ellis who introduced me to Steven Blank’s book The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which sounded an awful lot like what I had blogged about.  Whew.  Oh, and Steve’s even got a new blog.
Continue reading 'Customer Development and Start-up Models'»