Customer Motivated Entrepreneurship and the Lean Startup
Posted: July 24th, 2010 | Author: Zvi | Filed under: Entrepreneurship, Structo | 6 Comments »As a hacker-founder (an entrepreneur who develops their own products), how familiar does this sound to you:
- Have an awesome idea. Don’t tell anyone about it.
- Decide to build it, convinced that everyone will love it.
- Still don’t tell publicize it.
- Keep working on the product. Not as wild about the idea anymore.
- Come to some milestone in the product. Show it to one or two people.
- Start to think about marketing. How are you going to market this? Haven’t really thought about this before…
- Bleh, so many little remaining things to do.
- Come up with another really great idea – even better!
- Give up. Not like you had any users who gave a crap…
- Move onto the next idea. See step 1.
I’ve been through this half a dozen times in the last two years alone. It sucks, as I look back on all the dead web applications and “startups” I’ve done. I still look back and think that some of them are still great ideas – in fact, similar products have come later that have been very successful.
No more. I’m not doing that again.
One of the main “lean startup” tenets is a focus on ensuring that customers want your product, making customer development more important than product development itself. As I was thinking about my next product (having built an awesome product previously, yet completely missed how to market it), I was interested in following this path myself.
Knowing how I work, an initial focus on customer development meant more than knowing that I’d be building a product that people wanted. Far more important than that, my belief is that, by gathering a following and users who actually want the product, I’d be motivated to continue it. I can’t give up if I have actual users, I’ll see it through to completion.
Here’s a generalized view of my method:
- Come up with idea. Yes, this rocks.
- Talk to as many people as possible about it initially. Gather feedback, generally positive.
- Think heavily about my ideal customer, and figure out how to reach them.
- Develop minimum viable product – in this case, a well designed landing page and screencast.
- Make initial push to get users (and by users, I mean people signing up for updates via landing page).
- Engage users.
- Continue to network with anyone who is interested.
By step 6, something very different has happened. Without writing a line of code (for the real product) yet, I had interest – customers. Some findings:
- I’ve gained a strong following of people interested in the product.
- I’ve gathered commitments from a number of people to really use the product.
- I’ve validated my idea as well as I can without having an actual product to use with.
- Received interest from potential investors.
- Downside: With my particular product, I’ve received a good amount of feedback that in order to continue pursuing costumers, I really need to have something people can tinker with. However, I can continue with product development knowing that I’ll have people willing to give it a spin.
Looking to learn more? Check out my startup Structo – we’re a hosted database that enables web developers to build web applications faster.
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7/24/2010
Customer Motivated Entrepreneurship and the Lean Startup | Zvi Band
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