Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.
Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.
We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.
Unlike many other startup processes, Customer Development is deep, detailed, and rigorous.
Learning how to interact with customers is something that anyone starting any business must master. It's an amazing opportunity to be able to learn the ropes at an established company and then employ your expertise at your own company.
For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core.
When you spend time with potential customers, you get to hear about their struggles firsthand. You see their eyes light up with excitement or darken with confusion. You learn things you would never find in a survey, database, or questionnaire. You learn why people buy.
The purpose of a business is to create customers.
Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business.
The purpose of a business is to create a customer.