They’re an albatross if they perform as they do in a large company, and believe that they “own&# customer interaction, feedback to engineering and authoring market requirements documents. They’re an asset to a startup if they understand that their job is to get the founder outside the building and in front of customers. MORE >>

They were deep into Customer Discovery and presented a ton of customer data on the validity of their initial hypothesis – target customers, pricing, stickiness, etc.  Wait a minute, what about the rest of Customer Development ? Aren’t you going to validate your hypotheses by first getting some customers?”. MORE >>

The Customer Development process is the way startups quickly iterate and test each element of their business model , reducing customer and market risk. The first step of Customer Development is called Customer Discovery. outside the building and test them in front of customers. How can I help?” MORE >>

As a founder you are testing a series of hypotheses about all the pieces of the business model: Who are the customers/users? An early indication that you’ve found the right business model is when you believe the cost of getting customers will be less than the revenues the customers will generate. Customer Acquisition. MORE >>

Customer Development is all about gathering a list of what features customers want by talking to them, surveying them, or running “focus groups.” As the engineers were busy rearchitecting the original Stanford MIPS chip into a commercial product, one of my jobs was to find out what features customers wanted.  It’s not. MORE >>