Ask HN: Have you done Customer Development when launching a project?

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I am building a curated list of resources for entrepreneurs who want to launch their online business (http://www.founderstack.co/). There are many articles/guides on how to do customer development but, when reading first person accounts of projects being launched, many entrepreneurs seem to start with an MVP without doing customer development interviews. What is your experience?

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Always start with customer interviews. It sounds obvious, and even the people that do them can mess things up by pitching to early or leading customers to the answers they want to hear. THe best practice is to usually ask about past actions or behaviors rather than 'what will you do' or 'what do you want'. The term is called New Years Effect I believe, because obviously if you ask someone about getting in shape they will lie based on what they want to do, but may have never done before. Another great read is the book 'The mom test', to carry out realistic user interviews

+1 for the mom test.

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