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Comment by vinceguidry | Hacker News Reader

What if you don't have any customers?

Would recommend you check out "The entrepreneurs guide to customer development"!

Customer Development is a process that's really meant to be applied to prospective customers. The whole point is to figure out what problems the market needs, and ultimately what kind of solutions there might actually be a market for.

Instead of building something and then going to people and asking if it's useful, find out what a large segment of the market would find useful first.

Get out of the building and talk to actual people - create simple experiments to help you prove whether a market actually exists. Validate your assumptions before building. Follow the Lean Startup methodology :)

Then ignore the stupid advice in the title and likely article (I just skimmed but only saw noise) and instead of listening to anyone else, build something amazingly great. Seriously, build something amazing and then tell people about it.

Nobody is going to tell you how to do it. it has to come from you.

Super interesting perspective here :) Question - in this no-customer scenario what's the downside of trying to solicit feedback from others while you go along?

"imagine if I made a night-sky, but, like, out of swirls"

-Vincent Van Gogh, hypothetical

Starry Night (Value: est. ~$80M-$100M+)

Vincent Van Gogh, Actual

The point is to talk to people to know whether something you want to build is actually going to be great before you go and build it. Most of the time when people go and build what they think is "great" they end up realizing that nobody actually cares. It's a sure-fire way to waste a ton of time of money, which for startups, are the two scarcest resources you have.

this actually isn't bad advice for idiots. so if you're an idiot, by all means it's probably better to ask someone, "how'd you like it if" rather than build it and see. As a great example, everyone knows people like battery life. So if you're an idiot, a great question to ask your customers might be, 'How'd you like it if we made a giant battery, like a car battery, that you can take along as an external battery booster for your next Samsung, so that you can just have it connected and have 72 days of life. It would be deep discharge, so that you have hundreds or thousands of cycles." Why did I use this example? Because only an idiot would ask any customers this. It's idiotic. But if you're the kind of idiot who would make that - then by all means! ask them.

On the other hand, steve jobs didn't need to ask his customers how they'd like an iphone - he told them why they'll like it.

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