Quotes About Customer Development

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.

Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business.

Infosys is quite disciplined about its selection of customers, refusing to serve those who do not help the company to develop new sources of value.

Customer development is the act of gaining traction with customers, of finding a fit between what you make and what they want. This traction is worth far more than fancy technology or expensive marketing.

Also, we were lucky to have Steve Blank as an investor and adviser. Back in 2004, Steve had just begun preaching a new idea: the business and marketing functions of a startup should be considered as important as engineering and product development and therefore deserve an equally rigorous methodology to guide them. He called that methodology Customer Development, and it offered insight and guidance to my daily work as an entrepreneur.

Using the Product Development Waterfall diagram for Customer Development activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature. They both measure something, but not the thing you wanted.

Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.

The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.

Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential.

Asked if he wanted to do market research, he said, "No, because customers don't know what they want until we've shown them.

Unlike many other startup processes, Customer Development is deep, detailed, and rigorous.

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

2.Enhancing the customer's competitive standing.