I want to be talking about customer development and to take you through just an outline of
the of the lectures tonight so you can get a sense of where you are as we move through it.
So I'll start off by increasing customer development, and then I will zero in on a part of the customer development model,
which is customer discovery and tell you how you prep for this phase.
And then I will look at one part of customer discovery, which is testing that there is a problem.
And then I will look at the second part, which is testing your solution to that problem.
We'll start with what is customer development,
and then I'll start by telling you a bit of a story about a product launch that I was involved with quite a number of years ago.
Now we were taking a product which already exists and was being sold to businesses and
we were reshaping it for a consumer market and we were really sure about that market.
We knew who we're selling to. We knew exactly why they were going to buy this new this product, which we were about to build and launch to them.
So we spent nine months building the products, putting in the infrastructure to support millions of users, marketing it with a with a big PR bang.
We even had a a full time marketeer on the team to drum up interest in our in our new product.
And we had a big launch and a few months went by and we looked at user numbers and we were at 1500 and practically none
of those users were coming back again at this point were still we'd spent £200,000 and all of our budget was gone.
It was a failure. The products had failed. So what went wrong and what could we have done differently?
And we were suffering from conviction. I think that most entrepreneurs suffer from this rather cruelly.
It's one of the qualities that you need to be a successful entrepreneur in the first place.
But it's also the one thing that can kill you off really early. All around the world, people are taking their money, taking other people's money,
and diving headlong into product development and building businesses based on nothing more than hunches.
You shouldn't feel bad about it. If you've got the guts to give up your job at P.W., say.
Mackenzie As well as probably a massive ego, you'll have complete and utter conviction that the idea that you that you're taking on is going to work.
If you're bright and eloquent, you'll probably have convinced lots of other people,
your friends, your family, some seed investors to back you with some money.
But most of the time, you've got absolutely no clue whether or not this is going to work.
No clue what you're spending your hard won money on products for people that you don't know exist,
serving needs that you don't know exist, using messaging that you've got no idea will work.
Going out via channels which you which you don't know will work for you.
You're so confident in your plans that you put in place the infrastructure to support
the millions of customers and users that you're going to inevitably end up with in.
Once you've finished your development and it's your conviction, your idea,
your Achilles heel that makes you blind to the complete insanity of what you're doing.
So what's the alternative? Well, if your conviction is driving you towards a the realisation of your business, then stop.
Stop driving and start searching. Realise that you can't possibly know your destination at the beginning of your journey.
And from here on in and to search mode, you're looking for a successful business model.
And so you should be ready to learn from the clues that you discover along the way.
Sometimes you probably take a wrong step, but because you're constantly checking your progress as you go,
you can retrace your steps and and get back on the trail of that business.
So I've been taking one of Maria just a few weeks ago slides and redrawn it.
This is my stick, man. I think she had an artist impression.
And if you can remember, Maria was talking about knowing where you needs to go and it feeling like a big giant leap to get there.
And how taking a few smaller stepping stones you could get to that destination in a more sensible and safer fashion.
So I want to continue that analogy today. What would this look like from above?
If I have more time, I would have done a sort of 3D swing around to see it from the top, but that's what it would look like from top.
So my artist's impression of a stick man from the top. So and the reality is your journey is actually never in a straight line like this.
So let's get rid of those.
And while that first step might go according to plan, when you get there, you may discover that the next one is off in a slightly different direction.
And that's how you keep going with an open mind searching for the next step and learning as much as you can as you go.
And quite often you find out that your goal isn't quite where you thought it was, but hopefully the prize will be bigger.
This is doing the rounds on Twitter a few weeks ago and I really like it.
It's basically saying the same thing, how you see the road ahead,
a straight a straight line to your destination, what it will actually be like a very bendy road.
And I really like this because the destination is further away in the picture, in the middle and in a different place.
And what you can plan for today, virtually nothing. You've got no idea. So the only thing you can plan for is that uncertainty.
And customer development is a way of systematically discovering and walking that path to get your business up and running.
And I'll talk today about some of the theory and the methodology behind customer development.
And you should go away and if you haven't already, by the numerous big, thick books on this.
But at its core, it's just a mindset. So don't get too daunted by all of the theory.
It's just a way of thinking.
It's a common sense mindset of questioning everything about your business and questioning your conviction and constantly asking yourself this
question What are the riskiest assumptions that I'm making about this business and what's the quickest and cheapest way of validating them?
And this thinking isn't particularly new either. I've got a very old school business mentor who's been around for a lot longer than me.
And I spoke to him about a new venture in the used car business that I was about to invest in.
And his advice to me was, go and speak to some used car dealers and talk to them about their needs.
Now, that advice is straight out of customer development.
But it's also common sense, and it's what successful entrepreneurs have been doing forever.
So thinking back to that Big Bang project that I spoke about earlier on,
what would have happened if I had questioned more of my assumptions and and tested them before entering headlong into that product development phase?
And I'll never know whether or not we were we would have been successful or not.
But based on the way I know for certain, if we'd gone and spoken to a few customers in the very early stages,
we would have found out that our idea about who they were and what they were interested in was wrong.
Our assumptions, which seemed really sensible, were really flawed.
And well, I think the product probably had has value, but probably presented in just a completely different way.
I can't talk too much about the detail of it because of confidentiality, but and looking back,
I can see lots and lots of opportunities of how right in the beginning we could
have tested so many aspects of the idea that we had without building anything,
and we already had a product that was being sold to businesses. We could have we could have just used that and gone and tested it.
It wouldn't have been perfect by any means. We would have found out very quickly whether or not it was going to work in that consumer market.