In this episode, we talk about the importance of thorough customer development in the form of research, surveys, and as much actual customer interaction as possible.

We want to make sure we really understand the pain points and what we can do to help solve them. If you’re a small business owner, please click here to take the survey if you have a moment.

Or forward the link: http://profitably.customerdiscovery.sgizmo.com.

Thanks!

Transcription:

Hi. I am Adam Neary, and this is “Confessions of a Startup CEO.” This Episode 4: Customer Development. So, as you know, we have been spending a lot of time on recruiting last couple of weeks as we recruit for two key roles. We have been spending a lot of time on product development as we built our prototype, and we have been spending a lot of time on legal and finance and those sorts of logistical issues, but the number one priority for the next couple of weeks is going to be around customer development. Really taking the time to make sure that we understand what the key customer pain points are and then within that one or two or three pain points that we have identified, we want to find out those customers who are feeling most immediately. So we are going to do a lot of primary market research and we will be doing a lot of interactions with customers.

So a couple of different dimensions that we are looking at…industry vertical. I have received feedbacks from a lot of very smart folks who are trying to find sort of that vertical that we can target right out of those gates. Whether that is retail or manufacturing, warehousing or distribution, or professional services. Even within professional services you have accountants design shops, web shops, attorneys. We really want to have a good concept of which is that vertical who respond to these pain points and which ones are feeling them even most.

In addition to industry we are looking at the business side. So whether it is head count or revenue, is it the 50 to 60 FTE business size or whether it is $1M or $2-$2.5M, $5 to $10M, you know, what are the revenue levels and the head count levels and this problem really exists? You know at certain level of small organizations there is no data. They don’t even use QuickBooks for you know the majority of the business that they are in and that is okay. It is appropriate. You don’t want to take on tools before you need them. That is a consideration at the floor. At the ceiling, you know once you get through certain size there are a lot of other opportunities out there in the market. The savings that you are going to get running cleanly if it is going to save your $100,000 a year you can afford to spend a lot of money on those tools and we don’t necessarily want to be in that space. We are going to be doing this research.

There are a couple of different channels that we are going to need this information from. So I continue to call you know 10 phone calls a day and 20 phone calls a day trying to reach out to customers and have interactions with small businesses that I know. We have put together a survey that I think is great and hopefully we are going to reach thousands with this survey. If you are a small business you are watching this, we will send a link in with the post. Definitely take the survey and it is not just for my benefit but also the more we learn about very small businesses that are out there, the more targeted our solutions can be and it can reflect your needs. So you know it is a great opportunity to get you knows in an early stage of a product.

So survey is out there and then we are also going to be contracting (it sounds like) a outsourced lead generation firm that can do some primary research and make some phone calls on our behalf because they have a volume and start to ask small businesses you know hey you really feel those pain points are…it is not this are we missing it…what else is it can you give us a feedback so that we can continue to hone this solution and make it useful.

So in this primary market research is going to be the major point of focus for March. If we have spoken to 5000 companies by the end of March and say listen this is really where we need to target our initial products just build the product around this room and I think it has been a great space.

If we finalize a team by then and have a working prototype and we are incorporated to have all those legal logistical issues all sorted out by April 1^st, I think we will be in a great position. So in the best we are going to go and keep track on this thing and leave your comments. I love to hear your opinion on customer discovery and customer validation. If you have any great ideas on how to get more of that feedback we would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks.