"What if everything you think you know about taking products to market is wrong? What would you
do differently if you realized that only 1 out of 10 new product introductions result in a profitable
business? Would you continue to operate the same way, week after week, year after year?"<p>- Steve Blank, Four Steps to Epiphany<p>Like most startups, I have struggled through the pains of product market fit, multiple pivots and struggling to find customers.<p>What if there was a way to quickly and accurately determine not only if your idea is on the right track but to iterate through product/market fit and even pivots before you endure the sweat and heartbreak of building a few MVP's?<p>Obviously there are lots of challenges to creating such a service, but I think it is a discussion worth having. In the spirit of CD, let's start the ball rolling with some questions:<p>1. Does your resume include a failed startup?
2. With hindsight being 20/20, should you have done more Customer Development?
3. Would you now consider a service to improve and expedite that process?
Your proposal sounds like a wish-fulfillment fantasy for founders who want to skip the hard part.<p>I'm skeptical that you could generalize the process. But even if you could, it wouldn't make any sense to offer it as a service to startup founders, because you would then control the biggest value creation step. They would be nothing but idea sources, and ideas are worth very little. Instead you would just use your fantastic process to churn out your own products, possibly paying small royalties to people who come to you with good introductions & ideas.<p>Or let me put it another way: every angel fund, startup accelerator, and VC would love to have a magic way to "quickly and accurately determine if an idea is on the right track". That's what they spend all their time thinking about. Do you really think they're missing something obvious?
To give you an embarrassing personal anecdote: In my first startup I wanted to do customer development. The lean startup was a fresh and growingly popular idea, and we devoted more time and energy talking to potential customers than turning our proof-of-concept prototype into an MVP. It looked smart on paper. Unfortunately that didn't go so well and my conclusion was that we were doing customer development wrong. So we tried to do customer development "better" instead of pivot.<p>I was so mentally set in my idea that I consistently gravitated to the next-simplest explanation when I encountered sad evidence. And even though I believed I was being smart and understood customer development, I was following a checklist of things I thought I was supposed to do and was confused when we stagnated. I pretty much was asking to learn my lesson the hard way. :)<p>It seems very plausible that new products and services can be built to help founders be more effective at customer development. However one major obstacle if you outsource customer development too much will be dodging bullets as the messenger.<p>If I had used a CD service I'd probably assume the person was doing it wrong. They don't get my product, they are bad at sales, they aren't finding the right customers, etc. And then I'd wonder why I was throwing away my money (out of my personal pocket) for a service that wasn't "working". Unless you're a customer development superhero there might even be a little truth in all those things – it's going to take you a while to orient to the company's vision and market.<p>Another issue is that you'll probably see adverse selection from your clients. Folks who are good at customer development or stumble into promising early traction probably aren't going to hire a consultant for that stuff. So you're going to get people who either have an aversion to talking to customers and/or have hit a wall finding customers. And it's quite possible that the stuff you'll try is very similar to the stuff they tried and failed. So most of your clients might be biased towards failed startups, which may create a lot of churn and make it harder to gain inbound leads.
There is an absurdly high need for this service, but my god this is a hard task. I think the way to do this is spend 6 months working exclusively with about 10 early stage startups (pre PMF) which are relatively similar in the type of market they're going after. You then help them however you think you can in getting to PMF. Keeping the types of markets similar lets you get to actionable learnings quicker; an important learning for a gaming startup isn't going to be as useful for one built on enterprise sales. The help you provide could be customer interviews/sales/lead generation/landing page testing/anything. But the goal is to try and work out which of the tactics lead to the most progress for each startup, then create a playbook that can be applied to the next batch of 10 startups you help. Then as that playbook becomes more refined you slowly start to productise some of these services to speed up the process and add more startups to each batch. Then a few years down the line you have a low touch software product that will take founders through each of the steps you have worked out are most useful for startups operating in their type of market. This is a slow process for sure, but I think to be successful at this you have to acknowledge how broad the problem is and how little you know how to solve it right now.
1. YES!<p>2. Well this seems like one of those questions you could always say yes to. "Do you think you should have saved more money in your 20s?" "Do you think you should have worked out more over the past 5 years?" Who isn't going to say yes?<p>That being said, the failure of our business came about because the business model of the market we were serving shifted, as a result of a new piece of technology. Our customers didn't anticipate this shift (customers don't know what they want until they see it in some cases) and we, when the other business model came about, didn't recognize its significance. So, alas, I don't think customer development would have helped because nobody had invented the thing that killed us at the time we would have been doing customer development.<p>3. YES! I would love to buy a customer development as a service type service. Part of the problem for me is that customer development is sometimes very hard, it's not always easy to identify the customers for a particular idea.
Wow ! I think it is great to see the comments on this thread. Thanks jwillgoesfast for asking this question.<p>I have actually been working on building a Product/Market Fit (Customer Dev) as Service product for the last 12 months and before that I had been advising (mostly on shaping up ideas to get the product definition right) / helping out two new startup teams every month, for about 7 years now. This happened primarily because I enjoy meeting startups and because I was part of a large alumni network which would reach out.<p>The key assumption for the P/M-F service is whether something like this can be scalable and work in a self-serve mode (i.e. where I am not in the room)<p>So I have kept iterating on the framework, took inputs from the founders I had advised in the past. My key question to them was "How did I help you even though I was not really a expert in the marketing you were targeting?"<p>I also conducted lean canvas workshops with startups in US and India (and across sectors including one 7-year old pharma company trying to launch a product) till I could start standardizing (so that it could then be coded into software) the P/M-F process and build a self-serve tool. The tool has now taken the shape of an "intelligent" software which asks startup founders questions and assigns them tasks to do.<p>There is a lot of complexity in the tool. And it needs to be much more intelligent as well. We have explored using machine learning at the backend, but so far the intelligence is based more on a decision tree structure, rather than any machine learning.<p>Currently in private alpha, testing with some startups and an accelerator, and will release this soon for others, hopefully by end of this month.<p><a href="http://www.uberstarter.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.uberstarter.com</a>
Attended the Chicago Lean Startup Challenge this summer. They push teams to do experiments to determine if their guess/business idea is solving a real need of a customer segment. This 8 week program has saved a lot of companies from building the wrong product and addressing the wrong problem. Watch some of the videos on BuiltinChicago.org to hear how the interview process lead to a major pivot and the start of a company. Summary: Don't built it unless you have done considerable customer interviews and determined A. you are addressing a morphine problem not an aspirin problem and B. The customer base will pay for your solution. Then you build and A/B test. :)
If you could do this quickly, reliably, and repeatedly - in other words, if there's actually a business in this - then you are far better off starting a conglomerate to own these businesses outright than to sell the service to founders.
I think if a startup has spent a bunch of time building a product without considering who should use it and how they should reach those people then they're pretty fundamentally isolated from the industry they wish to service.<p>Steve Blank's not saying the other 90% were good ideas.