The Fallacy of Customer Development

http://www.ashmaurya.com/2011/01/the-fallacy-of-customer-development/

by DanielRibeiro • 15 years ago

28 4 15 years ago

arkitaip• 15 years ago

I've recommended Steve Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" several times but I didn't know that the blog author has published Running Lean, a (PDF) book on customer development just for web startups. I'm going to order it right now. Thanks for posting this.

viscanti2• 15 years ago

The goal of customer development is to uncover a problem that is worth solving (and that people are willing to pay for). It's not billed as a customer acquisition strategy. Focusing on scaling before you reach product-market fit is premature optimization. You'll likely be testing how to sell the wrong product to the wrong group.

Once you've reached product-market fit, then the focus should be on customer acquisition strategies (often times the strategy is to just throw money at it). That's the time it's worth bringing in someone who has experience scaling a business, as well as experimenting with different marketing strategies.

ashmaurya• 15 years ago

Customer development is not billed as a customer acquisition strategy but there is an implicit expectation that because "customers hold all the answers", cust dev will reveal the path to customers.

I don't believe customers hold all the answers and the point of this post is that you can't be complacent about finding and testing that path to customers.

viscanti2• 15 years ago

I agree that the idea that "customers hold all the answers" is flawed, but that's not what customer development is. A better phrase would be "no answers are found inside the building". You can't just ask people what they need and build it, that's not customer development. Customer development is about finding a problem worth solving and that people are willing to pay for. You need to understand the problem thoroughly, and that requires you to get out of the building and talk to lots of people. If the solution was obvious, and the people you talked to told you what to build, then you wouldn't have much of a business, because the problem would be easy to solve (and someone would have solved it, or they'd do it in house).

Customers don't hold all the answers, but they can point you to the right solution. You still need to come up with an optimal solution. Once you reach product-market fit, then you can work on optimizing customer acquisition. Before product-market fit, you don't know what your product really is or who your customers really are. Any time spent optimizing that is time that could be better spent finding the actual problem and getting to product-market fit. At best you risk wasting time, at worst you risk following the wrong path because you've invested so much time optimizing it, which would make pivoting to the "right" product/market much more difficult.

The Fallacy of Customer Development

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