Customer development is hard. Customer Development Lean StartupsIt takes work to get it right and you'll always be improving your technique. Here are a few tips I like to keep in my head while I'm getting out of the building. MORE >>

To sell something effectively you really need to understand your customer. You can look into customer profiling and personas as mechanisms for understanding your customers better. The advantage of doing this is that you have a very complete overview of your customer’s daily life. Customer Development MORE >>

Most customers tolerate bugs. Most customers tolerate products with missing features that they need (or think they need!) Most customers tolerate the quirks and hiccups that come with new technology and software. Customers can be quite forgiving. And use those customer interactions to learn from them. MORE >>

Either way, the “hurdle” for successful, scalable startups is high, and it gets higher every day as customer acquisition challenges continue to increase. There’s just no other way but, as Steve Blank has said for a decade, to “get out of the building” and talk to the only folks who matter—your customers. Customer Development 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 >>