Customer Discovery and Validation
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Customer discovery consists in turning the founders’ initial hypotheses about their market and customers into facts. Customer Validation attempts to “test sell” at every stage. It runs a continuing series of quantitative pass/fail tests to determine whether there’s strong product/market fit to justify scaling sales and marketing spending. (Steve Blank)
Q3 – 2013
- How do You Discover What Customers Really Want?
- Don’t fall in the A/B Test Trap, and Ask Yourself the 6 Essential Questions before Running that A/B Test.
2012
(Courtesy of Tom Eisenmann)
- Cindy Alvarez on applying customer development techniques with different types of customers and on when to NOT use surveys.
- Laura Klein on how to use personas, how to overcome reservations about shipping an early product version, and the importance of validating a problem, not a product.
- Brent Chudoba on using surveys to validate pricing, messaging, and other key decisions.
2011
(Courtesy of Tom Eisenmann)
- Laura Klein describes five fast/cheap/easy approaches to user research and usability testing.
- Josh Porter of HubSpot explains why A/B testing shouldn’t be limited to small changes.
- Brant Cooper reviews biases that managers from different functions bring to the customer development process.
- Rob Walling on ways to use inexpensive advertising to improve a site and learn about visitors.
- This infographic from FormStack (via Boston Innovation) analyzes the anatomy of a perfect landing page.
- Ben Yoskovitz describes how and why to use the “day in a customer’s life” technique.
- Elizabeth Yin offers advice on how to find and interview potential customers.
- Three posts by Cindy Alvarez: 1) on how to cope with the fact that research respondents’ answer to “Do you want…?” is always “Yes!”; 2) how and why to use personas in product development; and 3) “10 Things I’ve Learned” about customer development.
