Customer Development

Customer development is the formal process of identifying potential customers and figuring out how to meet their need. Many startups spend too much time on their product or service, which is important too, but not more so than the needs of their target audience. A successful startup needs to create a business plan that satisfies their target market and establishes themselves as useful and unique in the marketplace. Customer development is a process that can be used to discover, test and validate many business assumptions. These assumptions include whether a product solves a problem for a specific group of users, if the market is large enough to support such a product, and whether or not the business can scale to meet demands. Key points of Customer Development: 1. Customer Development minimizes the risk of failure - Although there is a lot of time spent talking about failure in the first two steps of the process, Customer Development actually minimizes the risks associated with failure. - It is easier to fail a product and re-develop it before it hits the market. Selling to new customers is hard enough without having to re-sell a product that failed publicly. 2. You need to understand the market you are in. - Understanding the market that you are in grows in importance with every step of the process. - You need to find the minimum feature set that you need to gain early customers. - Avoid spectacular failures in execution by learning before you launch and not after