- Solving Customer Problems.Ultimately, that's the essence of everything we wanna do as we progress from the early adopter to finding the mainstream buyer and crossing the chasm.When you think about that, you really sorta need to wrap your head around the fact that it's not features that we're providing customers.It's benefits that we're providing to them, and it's benefits about how we're solving their problems.Most startups tend to really focus on features because they're so enamored with their product and their technology.
- And perhaps, also, because they really haven't talked to a lot of customers yet. So remember, part of the customer development process that Steve Blank talks about in "The Startup Owner's Manual" is really about getting out and getting some customer experience and discussion around how your product helps them solve a problem.So features are really, let's remember that features are really the things that engineering builds.It's about capacity, speed, and size to describe your product.Benefits, as we mentioned on the previous slide, are really about what problems are you solving for the customer? How are you making something in their environment better, faster, or cheaper?The context that we also have to consider is, what market you are selling into?Are you selling into a business market or a consumer market?Because they have very different notions on what problems and benefits are.In the B2B market, problems are the centerpiece for most businesses.That's what they're trying to solve.It may be around securing data on a smartphone or transporting cargo in space in a more efficient way that maybe NASA can or making doctors more productive as they do their rounds within the hospital, talking to patients and recording information that the patient conveys to them.
- Now if we look at the consumers, they have very different needs.It's really about how they can enhance their life.It might be the latest spring fashion that they wanna go out and purchase. It might be the sports car that they've always dreamed of, or it might be that must-see movie that everybody is talking about.So you can see there are very different needs between the B2C market and the B2B market. But we'll focus on the B2B market and talk about problems.There are several different types of problems that you can tackle for a customer.
- Sometimes, they don't even know what the problem is.That would be a latent problem.So you have to educate them to show them why your product has value in their environment.Other times, they may not have urgency to solve the problem, a passive problem.That's typically manifests itself if you're selling to a technical buyer who really understands the problem but really doesn't have an urgency to solve it.A more interesting problem for you to actually benefit from as a seller is the active problem.Here you might have the economic buyer who is searching for a solution to help their business and solve a business need.
- Ultimately, vision, a customer with vision that sees a problem but also has moved forward to actually solve the problem, maybe with a do-it-yourself solution, that is sorta the home run for most startups looking for customers within a market. So for the bull's-eye for you would be a customer with a mission critical problem that they've already tried to solve themselves. They already know that you can help them, and what they're now maybe thinking about is ,in the long term, they need a partner like yourself to take over the maintenance and the up keep of the solution to their problem and also to provide them with new solutions as the problem expands in scope.
- Now let's go back to the chasm and talk about what the mainstream customer wants. The pragmatist customer wants a finished product that ideally is something that's off the shelf and somebody else is already using it.Because to them, that presents no risk.And remember, pragmatist buyers are very risk-averse.Now, as a startup, our goal is not to boil the ocean.We wanna understand what's the minimum product to ship, and we also wanna understand what features don't have to ship to this particular customer.For us, the perfect customer can be satisfied by a feature list that is basically just a paragraph.And hopefully, then that paragraph of features translates into a product that can be sold to thousands and maybe even millions of buyers.
- Now what is the minimum viable product?That is sort of the Holy Grail for us as a startup. It's the smallest group of possible features that will function as a standalone product.But in more importantly, it matches a problem that the customer has and that they wanna solve.So it's important to not only talk about what the MVP is from our standpoint as a product, but also we have to ensure that it matches a customer's problem and the customer is willing to pay for it.A great example of a minimum viable product out of the market is brought up or we can bring up with salesforce
