Comment by josephruscio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephruscio | Hacker News Reader

Missed a 4th reason for a lack of customer development: 4) Hard to get meaningful face time with customers and/or get honest, well-thought out responses from them, particularly hard for a brand-new startup without existing customers on existing products.

Customers are very busy people too, and they are not on your payroll. Totally agree that you should make your decisions as informed as possible, i.e. do as much Customer Development as you can, but ultimately a big part of a early-stage startup is making decisions without the luxury of a complete data set i.e. gut and luck.

Which is precisely why you need to "ship early" (get paying customers ASAP) and "ship often" (start developing them immediately and incorporating their feedback into development).

Agree on ship early/ship often, but most of the startups I've observed (granted, a small sample) didn't skip customer development because potential customers wouldn't call them back. By and large, I think most folks are willing to sit down with you for a cup of coffee for 30 mins and talk about their needs and how your product could help, especially if you make it clear up-front that this is not a sales call.

YMMV, but we've had great success with just sending an email or picking up the phone and asking people if we could chat for a bit.

Agree that most people who skip CD are doing for lack of trying ;-). I think the ease of gaining access depends largely on the target customer profile. Consumer, even SMB targeted stuff by definition has a large number of potential customers compared to the Enterprise. Additionally their barrier to purchase is much lower than the Enterprise, therefore the signal from your 30 minute cup of coffee is much stronger. It's a trickier proposition with Enterprise customers, but I guess that's why the deals are bigger.

>Customers are very busy people too, and they are not on your payroll.

Sometimes I wish they were on payroll, especially customers who left.

One frustrating thing I've learned is that people hardly ever tell you why they stopped using your product or lost interest in it.

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