How To Not Suck At Customer Development

Over the past ~2 years, I’ve been working almost exclusively on customer development and growth at Mom Trusted, with my consulting clients, and at Workhorse. In 2015 alone, I’ve had upwards of 100 customer development conversations. Along the way, I’ve learned a few lessons, some from personal mistakes and a few from observing others.

                                  All image credit goes to Scott Adams

Here are some of the pitfalls to avoid if you’re trying to learn something about your potential customers, instead of just paying lip service to the “customer development” buzzword.

Being Scared To Talk To Customers

This is, by far, the most unforgivable customer development sin. It’s impossible to get an accurate sense of reality without understanding, in extreme detail, the motivations and fears of your target customer. This fear of customer interaction lies in the fact that most founders (I’ve fallen into this trap in the past) have a mental picture of what their product/experience looks like and don’t want to burst that bubble. Maybe they also have a mental picture of what success will look like after they sell their company to Yahoo! for $100 million and don’t want to ruin that fantasy world by finding out that customers don’t want what they’re selling. Everyone has their own reasons for being scared to put themselves out there but this is the most dangerous sin on this list.

Putting A Layer Between You And The Customer

This is one I’ll never understand. I’ve come across founders, that for whatever reason, put a layer (or two) between them and potential customers. I don’t know if this stems from shyness or bubble bursting syndrome or what, but the net effect is that these founders always hear what their customers want or are frustrated with from some third party source. This is a great way to get incomplete or even plain wrong information, since the people who make up the layers (presumably employees or contractors) will try to tell you what you want to hear.

By not hearing any feedback directly, it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking things should be a certain way with no real evidence. In contrast, some of the best founders – including Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Steve Jobs, (Apple), and Tony Hsieh (Zappos) – correspond with their customers directly on a regular basis, even after their companies became multi-billion dollar Goliaths. Sorry, 10 person startup founders – there’s no excuse for not talking to customers directly.

Not Empathizing With The Customer

Empathy is such an underrated part of customer development. The problem with purely asking questions and using the responses to build your model of the target customer is that sometimes people don’t always verbalize the underlying emotional need they’re trying to express. For example, the success of Facebook can be very much attributed to people’s loneliness and desire to stay connected. But very few people would ever say that they use Facebook because they’re lonely. They would say they want to “stay in touch with family and friends” or “share important life events with people close to them”.

Customer development is all about building a complete model of the target customer. To build that complete model, you absolutely need to know the following:

• What gets them out of bed in the morning?
• What do they care about?
• Who is their customer?
• How are they measuring success?
• What are they motivated by?
• What keeps them up at night?

Empathy isn’t really something you can fake. Customers can tell if you’re just phoning it in and don’t really care about solving their problem. Be genuine and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what they share with you.

Not Even Knowing Who Your Customer Is

This sounds dumb – how can you not know who your customer is? It’s actually a really common issue for B2B startups at the earliest stages. For example, imagine you have a software tool to help salespeople. If you’re taking a top-down approach where you sell to the VP of Sales and sign an enterprise contract, then your customer is not the junior salesperson, it’s the VP of Sales. If you’re taking the bottom-up approach and getting individual salespeople to use your tool and then drive adoption through their organization, your customer is the junior salesperson. You can see the end result of these alternative approaches by looking at the difference in UX between Salesforce and a tool like DocSend. To me (not a VP of Sales), DocSend looks awesome. Salesforce, on the other hand, does not. I’m not the target customer though – with the success Salesforce has had, it’s pretty obvious that their target customer likes them a lot.

By properly defining the customer, you can start to get accurate answers to your customer development questions, which is the first step to building a product that solves a problem for someone.

Closing Thoughts

Every company, whether it’s a startup or a Fortune 500 corporation, is 100% dependent on its customer. Having a thorough understanding of a customer, their life, and their motivations is the only way to create something they actually want. Remember: while potential customers usually have a fixed need they want fulfilled, which can be physical (for example, hunger) or emotional (loneliness), the form of the solution may change over time. The only way you’ll be able to understand the need and the form of the solution is by truly empathizing with your customers’ pain. It’s a skill that takes practice but it starts with something super simple: Ask questions and actually listen to what your customers tell you!