Customer Development

notes taken from The Start Up Owner’s Manual — Steve Blank

Concept/Seed — —> Product Development — → alpha/beta test —> launch/1st ship

Do not assume you know what the customer wants. Relentless execution without knowing what to execute is a crime. Focusing on execution and delivering a product or service based on those initial untested hypotheses is a going out of business strategy. No business plan survives first contact with customers.

Customer Discovery- Develop a plan to test customer reactions to those hypotheses and turn them into facts.

— Awareness, interest, consideration, purchase

— Keep Customers — loyalty programs, product updates, customer surveys, customer check ins and calls

— Find out what publications your customer reads

— Viral marketing can’t start until there is a customer base to viralize

— make sure the customer is satisfied with the product, performance, price

Customer Validation — Tests whether the resulting business model is repeatable and scalable. If not return to customer discovery.

Customer Creation — builds end user demand and drives it into the sales channel to scale the business

Company building — transitions the organization from startup to company, focusing on executing a validated business model