- Steve Blank has created a customer development manifesto, which provides 14 rules for you to follow, as you step through the customer development process.
- Now, we're not gonna go through all 14 rules in this discussion, but we're gonna give you important highlights.
+ Rule number one, there are no facts inside your building, so get outside. Steve mentions that quite a few times in his book. And really the action for you is to meet one-on-one, face-to-face with customers. That's the only way that you're really gonna learn about what makes the customer tick, what his problems are, what his challenges are, and potentially he'll give you insights on how you can actually solve those problems with your product.
+ Rule number two, pair the customer development process with a product development process that is agile. It's important to provide your dev team with a continuous feedback loop to map customer need back to product capabilities. Unfortunately, if you're using a waterfall methodology, it'll be really difficult to take that feedback, and to power back into the product so that you had something that's readily available to show to your new customers.
+ Rule number three, failure is just an integral part of the process, because you're searching for a business model. And you're doing so by developing theories that you want to either prove or disprove. So really the action here is to experiment. Again, don't worry about execution. You're not a big company, you're looking for a customer. Big companies already know who their customers are and they probably already know how their products help their customers. So again, it's a search, and part of that search is the fact that failure is an inherent part of the learning process.
+ Rule number four, make continuous iteration and pivots. Again, this is just part of the process. You wanna be able to pivot for major business flaws, like choosing the wrong customer segment, or choosing the wrong market. You also wanna be able to iterate to fine tune your business model. So an example of that would be making pricing changes based on customer feedback.
+ Fast-forward rules number five and six. (not important)
+ Rule number seven, agree on a market type. This is critical. It changes everything if you're wrong. So you need to really take care on choosing a market type. Again, a wrong choice will disrupt your customer creation process. So make sure that all the stakeholders in your company are aligned behind your market choice, and then move forward with confidence.
+ Number eight, and this goes back to the fact again, that you're not a big company, you're a startup. So embrace that. So think about startup metrics that differ from those of an existing company. Again, we're focusing on a search, so we don't need to use big company metrics. In fact, save those for later. Focus on search milestones that you can agree upon, and then move forward to.
+ Rules nine and 14 fast forward, again, I'll leave that to you to actually read in the text. But ultimately all 14 of these rules come together so that it helps you reach your goal of discovering a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business model.
+ So make sure that you share them with all of your team members, but also make sure that you review them on a periodic basis, so that everybody is totally aligned.
