A lot of time of web startups is devoted to find the right product to sell to the right customer. While there are enough methodologies for technical development of products, there are only few methodologies for finding the right customer. Most of the old marketing methodologies don’t apply to web startups.
So there is this Customer Development process which I’m researching to use within our company. Customer development is under development by Steve Blank, and of course loads of other smart people. The reason for him to develop this process is his experience within startups that most of the startups fail because of bad marketing and business decisions.
Now there is a lot of discussion within companies in the terms of marketing and business development. Most of the times it’s referred to as ‘the suits’. People that take a big stake of your company and go out to lunch and play golf. And with all their time and money spent still there hasn’t been a single sale of the product. Which of course is ridiculous.
So early and repeating customer collaboration is one of the basics of Customer Development. It fits within ongoing trends we see on the internet and also the new generation working on awesome web products. That makes it a good weapon against the ongoing ‘negative’ rage against marketing.
What Agile Development has done for software development, customer development can do for marketing / business development.
A good start is to shape up a vision for your product / startup. Without that it’s just hard to sell. Having a central vision makes it easy for the people within the project to work independent, but even more important, to sell it to your first customers.
As Seth Godin states in his book The Purple Cow, your early customers / evangelists are the real sales people for your product. They spread the word about every little aspect of your product. Interesting part of this is that these people are more interested in your vision and future plans with your product.
Best examples here are the iPhone and iPad. The iPhone shipped early and lacked functions that needed work and weren’t released yet. Even simple features that other cheap phones had. But the vision presented with these products is what triggered early adaptors world wide to line up in front of the apple stores and buy an iPhone. The same is happening with the iPad. Without even touching or seeing the product, analysts determine that around 150.000+ iPads were sold in the first 60 hours. Crazy right?
Not if you think about it as early adaptors investing in a vision. It works for a lot of other startups too. A short and good talk about this is by Sheryl Sandberg. She talks about her experience at Facebook and her quest to work find gratification in her work at commercial companies.
Her tip: Make it personal and Make it work.