Son-of-a-bitch, it worked. My first step down the customer development path… | Hacker News Reader

Son-of-a-bitch, it worked. My first step down the customer development path…

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134 pointsgcheong32 comments

Erm. So he never tells what his product is, what questions he asked or what responses he got. Then he claims success before the product has even launched. And all people over here immediately throw their arms up to praise the new, awesome, groundbreaking methodology.

What is it with us nerds that we fall so easily for every new XP, agile, scrum, CD brainfart of the week? Is it that our brains are, on average, so exhausted from the constant hacking, that we crave to outsource at least the higher level thinking?

He had an extremely productive conversation with a cold prospect. From it, he got a compelling argument not to build a product he was otherwise ready to build. He didn't declare his business a success. He declared Steve Blank's recommendation a tactical success. And he's right.

Customer development isn't a software development methodology. Steve Blank is just talking about basic fundamental marketing, and giving it straightforward steps.

Well, that's fine and all. I think this approach was called "market research" or just "common sense" for a few decades, at least before Mr. Blank came along.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I just fail to see how it is a new idea in any way.

That observation would be a lot more witty if so many people didn't know how to do basic market research. I most definitely include myself among them.

I'm sort of baffled in two ways here, because neither do I think this is necessarily a prerequisite to launching a successful business, nor do I think someone who seriously needs that kind of advice has a snowball's chance in hell to actually create one...

Either you have a strong vision and go for it no matter what, or you feel a need to validate and know the right questions to ask. No book can tell you the right questions for your particular product, nor how to interpret the answers.

And for many products, especially the truly great ones, it doesn't even make sense to try and squeeze any kind of judgement out of potential customers. Can you imagine the google or twitter founders getting any useful feedback out of such a questionare?

Everyone would just have told them to stop and get a real job at the time...

And for many products ... it doesn't even make sense to try and squeeze any kind of judgement out of potential customers.

Can't agree any more. Doing straight up market research through this "customer development" approach probably great for most products. But there are some things for which there is little precedent, things we would take for granted today and yet would have been, at best, ambivalent about when they were first being imagined.

For example: A PC in every home. Few people would have bought into this when it was originally just Bill Gates' vision, in the way the whole world has bought into it now.

The internet and the world wide web are similar in that respect. As are so many other things, and more waiting to be created - things nobody knows they want yet.

I couldn't disagree more. Maybe the pundits would have told them to go get a regular job, but the users were clearly very passionate, or they wouldn't have continued iterating and developing the product. Believe it or not, there were a ton of people who got very addicted to twttr when it first came out, and I'm absolutely positive that, without their feedback, the product wouldn't be the massive success it is today.

i agree with you because the pundits should og told them to get a proper job on the other hand the product is a massive succes so really its 50/50

Amazing, you say talking to customers about what they are looking for, then targeting your product and business practices to this need is not Professor Blank's personal idea?

This sounds like unit testing. It sounds good when you hear about it, and you think you probably should be doing it, but you figure you're okay even without it.

And then you actually try it and then BAM! you realize its value and the difference it makes.

Exactly like unit testing - Eric Ries likes to talk about customer validation as an additional step added to TDD or testing in general - for example a new feature: to constitute progress, first it has to work, then it has to matter.

The first time I tried CD on a new product idea, I quickly realized that my idea was wrong. I can't thank Steve enough for saving me the weeks/months of development I would normally have put into a project only for it to be mediocre performer in the market. I honestly wrote no software at all for the first time, called/met with a ton of people, and learned a lot in the process about how wrong ideas can be :)

I feel like this mentality changes you in ways you can't imagine until you do it. Recently when approached by a local businessman about a really lucrative project instead of doing the coding internally, I simply outsourced all the customer development through elance. So far results are everything we thought they would be and more. And I've done almost no work.

This is lightyears ahead of where I was years ago - I remember blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on projects that never even got to market! Now I'm spending ~500$ to outsource customer development (in specific cases - depends on business model of course) and getting better results.

I would really be interested in hearing something specific about one of these projects, as a kind of contrast. When you say you outsource the customer development onto Elance, what does that mean? Isn't the customer development the part you have to do?

Thats confusing to me also, did you mean the product development? I could see outsourcing the coding would be easier then having people run around and interview people for you.

For example, come up with a quantitative market hypothesis (e.g. X% of Y businesses contacted by method Z in will be interested in buying the "software". Also problem statements etc etc etc - anything quantitative. We setup a simple data collection form (a-la kissmetrics) for the minions at elance and set them at finding out the answer. They generate target lists (web scraping etc), contact them, collate the results and the rest is pretty simple. I've done it in stages so it's not all the same people doing the work.

Now we are starting to outsource the development of a repeatable sales process, which will be an interesting thing. It'll be the first project I've done almost no work on, but could be the most lucrative!

So we are still doing some of the CD, but the hard part (getting out there and finding early adopters, interviewing them, collating feedback etc) is automated.

Could you maybe write a blog post with a concrete example of a project you researched and rejected like this? I'd love to read that....

Yeah, I'd like to read that, too.

I'm not the blogging/twitter type. Never done it actually, and don't plan to. I'd rather be doing things than writing about doing them :)

The next time you guys all think that the "business guy" in start-ups is overrated, think about the time you clicked the up arrow here.

Your eureka moment here is is a akin to a business guy setting up his first website.

"The next time you guys all think that the "business guy" in start-ups is overrated, think about the time you clicked the up arrow here."

The business guy is someone who has read Steve Blank's book and put it into practice?

Any "technical guy" can read the book and put the ideas into practice (far easier than a business guy teaching himself to code ). Talking to your customers is hardly magic. Why do they need a "business guy" again (again confining the discussion to the kind of activity talked about in the bog entry. Anyone can do this. There are specialized business skills which do call for "business guys" but talking to potential customers when you plan a startup is hardly a specialist skill).

EDIT: I am just playing the devil's advocate here. I think there is insufficient information in the blog post to make it some kind of paean for the "business guy" and/or a counterpoint to the supposed underrating of "business guys".

Not sure I agree with that. While in theory, anybody could apply this advice equally well, there are certain types of people who are too far down the rabbit hole to properly process feedback.

For us, it's definitely been very helpful to have a non-technical founder on board, someone who can push for problems to be solved even when they're inconvenient (or technically insignificant), because they don't code on a day-to-day basis.

I suppose this is more a case for a "savvy product guy" than a "business guy" per se, although both refer to non-technical people.

"However, a class on product realization at Stanford peaked my interest and I decided to pitch my idea to get into the class."

I'm already not listening. Why is it when somebody from any other school in the U.S. except for top-10 schools says something like this it goes:

"However, a class on product realization at school peaked my interest and I..."

I now know that you think your idea is on shaky ground and you have to plug your school to make you and your idea seem legit.

Note to top-10 U.S. schools, you need to have a required 1-credit class that all students must take. In it, the only thing that is taught is that students are not ever to refer to their overpriced place of education except when asked. It's insufferable and only makes the speaker/author sound like they are incapable of providing strong ideas of their own and have to bolster their statements with a brand label.

If it's not clear why this is necessary (i.e. you went to a top-10 school and this concept completely mystifies you) pretend we are talking about something else, say the recent snowfall on the East Coast of the U.S. and I say "When I was out shoveling snow in my Louis Vuitton coat..." or "I was loading groceries into my Mercedes..." or "I realized I was running late to the meeting when I noticed the time on my Blancpain..." -- I sound like a pompous asshole with a pathological need to insert needless and content free information.

People who go to top schools in other countries don't feel the need to constantly remind the world of this (well, unless they went to Oxford or Cambridge I suppose, but even then I find remarkable restraint). I can't ever recall hearing "When I did some mundane thing at the University of Tokyo..." or "There I was, doing some typical activity at the University of Heidelberg..."

Seriously, stop. And tell all your friends. It's really only hurting them.

The most amusing thing about this rant is that it completely overlooked the most egregious error in that sentence fragment - an error, I had sincerely hope is not representative of Stanford students in general.

Ha! I didn't even make it that far I was so turned off. But I'm not a Grammar Nazi. Even Stanford students can use English how they want.

I understand your dislike of egotism around schools. This is certainly an issue that requires education on "not being a jerk". That being said, this author used it in a relevant context - because he was attendig Stanford, he could go directly to Steve Blank for advice. You can't do this in the real world without paying his consulting rates. This isn't egotism, it's simply a perk of attending Stanford.

I admit to overreacting and I sincerely apologize for it. Upon further review (and skipping the first paragraph), he makes a good point.

But I do stand by my general point that he fell too easily into the insufferable trap of school egotism. I've made it a policy to pretty much just ignore anybody from the moment they start a sentence with "When I went to <insert specific school>...". It could be a top-10 school, or it could be some Tier-3 school. Unless the point is hyper-specific to that school, the school is really immaterial to the point.

Coincidentally when a school is named in a sentence like that it's almost always a top-10 US school. This is a common phenomenon for these schools.

I did some quick spot checking just to make sure I wasn't suffering from some kind of confirmation bias...

According to Google the phrase "What I was at <insert school>" occurs with the following frequencies:

School - Google Returns - US News Ranking

Harvard - 2,280,000 - 1

Columbia - 1,300,000 - 8

Yale - 976,000 - 3

Stanford - 962,000 - 4

Princeton - 651,000 - 1

MIT - 607,000 - 4

Duke - 553,000 - 10

Brown - 485,000 - 16

Cornell - 418,000 - 15

Compare to Tier-3 schools with large student populations

KSU - 91,300

Biola - 56,800

DePaul - 45,200

UVA - 45,600

Some of the schools barely register at all, even reasonably notable ones. I even tried a couple versions of their names to get more results...

George Mason University - Which has the largest student population in the state, and is #1 on USNews's list of Up-and-coming National Universities has the #1 public policy school in the nation, and several other top-10 and top-20 schools and programs (Economics, Political Economics, Law and Economics) etc.

GMU - 3

George Mason - 4

Old Dominion University - one of only 101 public universities with a Carnegie/Doctoral Research-Extensive distinction, large student population

ODU - 10

Old Dominion - 1

Kettering University (formerly GMI) - Ranked consistently as one of the best Engineering Schools in the U.S.

Kettering - 7

GMI - 7

The college I went to beats all of those on the same Google search. Does that mean I went to school with a bunch of snobs who thought they were better than they are :(

Your school is a top ranked Tier-1 school isn't it? USNews ranks them in the top25.

I've also noticed a similar phenomenon among schools with a strong sports program. (Ohio State cough cough).

It would be an interesting little research project to come up with a set of typical self-referential statements like my sample one, and go through every school in the country and see where they show up.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these are not quality schools by any possible stretch of the imagination. But I'd be willing to bet a dollar that the delta between the average Kettering grad and the average MIT grad in the same field is not as high as the ego driven self-referential usage patterns would imply (the average MIT grad is not 80,000x better or more desirable than a Kettering grad).

What's usually surprising is how many of these types of statements ("When I was at...") usually end in a completely banal statement that any university student would be able to complete. Yet these statements are made with the kind of breathless urgency that would make the listener assume there was something really special about this particular permutation of a common experience that only a person who attended that school could really appreciate.

"When I was at Harvard College just a few years ago, there was never any question among young women that we would have both successful careers and successful families." - Caille Millner - http://www.imdiversity.com/villages/woman/careers_workplace_...

"When I was at Harvard four years ago, two of my roommates campaigned for George W. Bush..." - Aaron Greenspan - http://www.aarongreenspan.com/essays/index.html?id=18

"I told her that, when I was at Harvard in my Freshman year, I played football but I broke my wrist mid-season (true) but it still bothers me (false)." - John Vincent "Brother" Quinlan, Jr. - http://www.currentobituary.com/ShowObit.aspx?id=54113&me...

and many many others....

It's weird when you do it, but it works.

Many years ago I was involved in an expensive automotive hobby. I had an idea for a product that I needed and called one of the well known catalog suppliers and asked if they would carry my product if I built it. The owner was immediately excited since it was apparently something he had been asked for a few times before, but he didn't have a source. Same deal here: he told me what features it would need, what an approximate selling price would be, promised to feature it in his catalog as soon as I could build a few, etc...

Then my need for the product went away and I never built a single one. Sometimes wonder what would have happened if I did. I (obviously) didn't have the entrepreneurial mindset back then; now I'd jump on any idea like that!

Still, it's an amazing feeling when you get the "I knew I wasn't the only one thinking this" feedback.

...which also points to a problem a lot of startuppers have: Their product is too broad. Of course, we like to think of what we build as having broader appeal. However, the boarder something is, the harder time you'll have finding a customer to even do CD.

I think it isn't just people that are doing startups that have this problem. I see it in almost any project. Usually it starts out small but as you go you feel like you can build more and more into it, and that that will produce a 'better' product.

great article. Nice to see that Steve's principles worked out. Let us know how it goes tomorrow!

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