Customer Development
Intro to Customer Development
- What is customer development?
This article gives a high-level introduction to the customer development methodology and its five key tenets.
How to Conduct Customer Development
- [CHEAT SHEET] Making Valuable Things
Tal explains how to research customer value in the form of a question, with a survey of 16 different investigation methods. He then provides 27 ways to test an idea.
How to Interview Customers
- 'Get in the Van' and Other Tips for Getting Meaningful Customer Feedback
Michael provides a formula for how to interview customers that involves focusing on validating a problem.
- How to Design Your Customer Validation to Maximize Product/Market Fit
Sachin provides a clearly defined approach for customer development designed to maximize signal from the interviews. It involves collecting context on problems after defining a problem space (including stack-racking pain points), gauging the reaction to value propositions, and testing un-aided reactions to a solution.
- 12 Tips for Early Customer Development Interviews
Giff's tips cover nearly every aspect of a customer development interview, including how to prepare, how to ask questions, how to respond, and how to follow up.
- Talking to Humans: Success Starts with Understanding Your Customers
This is a book that fully explains many of the topics covered in Giff's blog post, above.
Customer Development Case Studies
- How Startups Should Do Customer Discovery: A Case Study
Steve provides a case study on a company that discovered a much cheaper way to deliver their solution to customers by talking to customers.