Good article, which is more for the case when you know your customers and when your sales process already kinda works (although not optimally).<p>For most startups though, the problem is that they don't know their customers, have an imaginary idea of what customers might need and create a product based on guesses.<p>Customer development (or other methods such as compiling/filtering data from forums/blogs) helps with figuring those and create powerful value propositions.