The Customer Development Methodology

The Customer Development
Methodology

Steve Blank
Sblank@kandsranch.com
1

Goals of This Presentation
 A new model for startups
 Introduce the Customer Development model
 Translate this knowledge into a better Company

Customer Development in the High-Tech Enterprise September 2008
2

Product Development Model

Concept/ Product Alpha/Beta Launch/
Seed Round Dev. Test 1st Ship

3

What’s Wrong With This?

Product Development


- Create Marcom - Hire PR Agency - Create Demand
Marketing Materials - Early Buzz - Launch Event
- Create Positioning - “Branding”

4


Product Development



• Hire Sales VP • Build Sales
Sales Organization
• Hire 1st Sales Staff

5


Product Development



• Hire Sales VP • Build Sales
Sales Organization
• Hire 1st Sales Staff

Business
Development • Hire First • Do deals for FCS
Bus Dev

6

Build It And They Will Come

 Only true for life and death products
 i.e. Biotech Cancer Cure
 Issues are development risks and
distribution,
not customer acceptance
 Not true for most other products
 Software, Consumer, Web
 Issues are customer acceptance and market
adoption

7

Chasing The FCS Date
 Sales & Marketing costs are front loaded
 focused on execution vs. learning & discovery
 First Customer Ship becomes the goal
 Execution & hiring predicated on business plan hypothesis
 Heavy spending hit if product launch is wrong
 Financial projections, assumes all startups are the same
=
You don’t know if you’re wrong until you’re out of
business/money

8

If
Startups Fail from a Lack of customers
not Product Development Failure

Then Why Do we have:
 process to manage product development

 no process to manage customer development

9

An Inexpensive Fix

Focus on Customers and Markets
from Day One

How?

10

Build a Customer Development Process

Product Development


Customer Development

? ? ? ?

11

Customer Development is as important
as Product Development

Product Development

Bus. Plan Dev. Test 1st Ship


Customer Customer Customer Company
Discovery Validation Creation Building

12

Customer Development: Big Ideas

 Parallel process to Product Development

 Measurable Checkpoints

 Not tied to FCS, but to customer milestones

 Notion of Market Types to represent reality

 Emphasis is on learning & discovery before
execution

13

Customer Development Heuristics

 There are no facts inside your building, so get
outside
 Develop for the Few, not the Many
 Earlyvangelists make your company
 And are smarter than you

 Focus Groups are for big companies, not startups
 The goal for release 1 is the minimum feature set
for earlyvangelists

14

Customer Discovery: Step 1


 Stop selling, start listening
 There are no facts inside your building, so get outside

 Test your hypotheses
 Two are fundamental: problem and product concept

15

Customer Discovery: Exit Criteria

 What are your customers top problems?
 How much will they pay to solve them
 Does your product concept solve them?
 Do customers agree?
 How much will they pay?
 Draw a day-in-the-life of a customer
 before & after your product
 Draw the org chart of users & buyers

16

Sidebar

How to Think About
Opportunities

17

“Venture-Scale” Businesses
 Create or add value to a customer
 Solve a significant problem/want or need, for
which someone is willing to pay a premium
 A good fit with the founder(s) and team at
the time
 Can grow large (≥$100 million)
 Attractive returns for investor

18

Ideas
 Technology Driven
 Is it buildable now? How much R, how much D?
 Does it depend on anything else?
 Are there IP issues?
 Customer Driven
 Is there an articulated customer need?
 How do you know?
 How big a market and when?
 Are others trying to solve it? If so, why you?
 Does it solve an existing customer problem?
 Opportunity Driven
 Is there an opportunity no one sees but you do?

19

Facts Vs. Hypothesis

Opportunity Assessment
s?


i
es
How big is the problem/need/desire?

th
How much of it can I take?


o
yp
 Sales

r H
Distribution Channel
Marketing o
ct


Fa
Engineering


20

Customer Validation: Step 2


• Develop a repeatable sales process
• Only earlyvangelists are crazy enough to buy

22

Customer Validation: Exit Criteria

 Do you have a proven sales roadmap?
 Org chart? Influence map?

 Do you understand the sales cycle?
 ASP, LTV, ROI, etc.

 Do you have a set of orders ($’s) validating
the roadmap?

 Does the financial model make sense?

23

Sidebar

Engineering
And Agile Development Methodologies

24

Traditional Agile (XP) Tactics

 Planning game
− programmers estimate effort of implementing cust stories
− customer decides about scope and timing of releases
 Short releases
− new release every 2-3 months
 Simple design
− emphasis on simplest design
 Testing
− development test driven. Unit tests before code
 Refactoring
− restructuring and changes to simplify
 Pair Programming
− 2 people at 1 computer

25

Unit of progress: Advance to Next Stage

Waterfall

Problem: known

26


Waterfall

Problem: known Solution: known

27


Waterfall

Problem: known Solution: known

28

Agile Development
• “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and
continuous delivery of valuable software.” http://agilemanifesto.org/
• Embrace Change
– Build what you need today
– Process-oriented development so change is painless
• Prefer flexibility to perfection
– Ship early and often
– Test-driven to find and prevent bugs
– Continuous improvement vs. ship-and-maintain

29

Unit of progress: Working Software, Features

Agile (XP)

“Product Owner” or
in-house customer

Problem: known

30


Agile (XP)

in-house customer

Problem: known Solution: unknown

31


Agile (XP)

in-house customer

Problem: known Solution: unknown

32

Unit of progress: Learning about Customers

Customer Development Engineering

Problem: unknown

Hypotheses, experiments, insights

33



Problem: unknown Solution: unknown


34





35



Data, feedback, insights



36


Incremental, quick, minimum features, revenue/customer validation

Data, feedback, insights



37

Engineering Tactics
 Split-test (A/B) experimentation
 Extremely rapid deployment
 Continuous deployment, if possible
 At IMVU, 20-30 times per day on average
 Just-in-time architecture and infrastructure
 Incremental investment for incremental benefit
 Software “immune system” to prevent defects
 Five why's
 Use defects to drive infrastructure investments

38

Five Why's

 Any defect that affects a stakeholder is a learning
opportunity
 We’re not done until we’ve addressed the root
cause…
 … including, why didn’t any of our prevention
tactics catch it?

 Technique is to “ask why five times” to get to the
root cause

39

Five Why's Example
 For example:
 Why did we change the software so that we don't make any
money anymore?
 Why didn’t operations get paged?
 Why didn’t the cluster immune system reject the change?
 Why didn’t automated tests go red and stop the line?
 Why wasn’t the engineer trained not to make the mistake?
 We’re not done until we’ve taken corrective action at all
five levels

40

Engineering
 How do you build a product development team
that can thrive in a startup environment?

 Let's start with the traditional way... Waterfall
 “The waterfall model is a sequential software
development model in which development is seen
as flowing steadily downwards through the phases
of requirements analysis, design, implementation,
testing (validation), integration, and maintenance.”

41

Customer Creation
Step 3


• Creation comes after proof of sales
• Creation is where you “cross the chasm”
• It is a strategy not a tactic

43

Customer Creation
Big Ideas
 Big Idea 1: Grow customers from few to many

 Big Idea 2: Four Customer Creation activities:
 Year One objectives
 Positioning
 Launch
 Demand creation

 Big Idea 3: Creation is different for each of the
three types of startups

44

New Product Conundrum

 New Product Introduction methodologies
sometimes work, yet sometimes fail
 Why?
 Is it the people that are different?
 Is it the product that are different?
 Perhaps there are different “types” of startups?

45

Three Types of Markets

Existing Market Resegmented New Market
Market

46

Three Types of Markets

Market

 Who Cares?
 Type of Market changes EVERYTHING
 Sales, marketing and business development
differ radically by market type
 Details next week

47

Type of Market
Changes Everything
Market

 Market  Sales • Customers
 Market Size  Sales Model
• Needs
 Margins
 Cost of Entry • Adoption
 Sales Cycle
 Launch Type  Chasm Width
 Competitive
• Finance
Barriers
• Ongoing Capital
 Positioning
• Time to Profitability

48

Definitions: Three Types of Markets
Market

 Existing Market
 Faster/Better = High end
 Resegmented Market
 Niche = marketing/branding driven
 Cheaper = low end
 New Market
 Cheaper/good enough can create a new
class of product/customer
 Innovative/never existed before

49

Existing Market Definition

 Are there current customers who would:
 Need the most performance possible?
 Is there a scalable business model at this point?
 Is there a defensible business model
 Are there sufficient barriers to competition from
incumbents?

50

Resegmented Market Definition (1)
Low End

 Are there customers at the low end of the market
who would:
 buy less (but good enough) performance
 if they could get it at a lower price?
 Is there a business profitable at this low-end?
 Are there sufficient barriers to competition from
incumbents?

51

Resegmented Market Definition (2)
Niche

 Are there customers in the current market who
would:
 buy if it addressed their specific needs
 if it was the same price?
 If it cost more?
 Is there a defensible business model at this point?
 Are there barriers to competition from incumbents?

52

New Market Definition

 Is there a large customer base who couldn’t do
this before?
 Because of cost, availability, skill…?
 Did they have to go to an inconvenient, centralized
location?
 Are there barriers to competition from
incumbents?

53

Hybrid Markets
 Some products fall into Hybrid Markets
 Combine characteristics of both a new
market and low-end resegmentation
 SouthWest Airlines
 Dell Computers
 Cell Phones
 Apple IPhone?

54

Company Building: Step 4


• (Re)build your company’s organization &
management

• Re look at your mission

55

Company Building: Big Ideas

 Big Idea 1:
Management needs to change as the company
grows
 Founders are casualties
 Development centric ⇒
 Mission-centric ⇒
 Process-centric

 Big Idea 2:
Sales Growth needs to match market type
56

Company Building: Exit Criteria

 Does sales growth plan match market type?
 Does spending plan match market type?
 Does the board agree?
 Is your team right for the stage of company?
 Have you built a mission-oriented culture?

57

New Product Conundrum

 New Product Introduction methodologies
sometimes work, yet sometimes fail
 Why?
 Is it the people that are different?
 Is it the product that are different?
 Perhaps there are different “types” of startups?

58

A Plethora of Opportunities

59

Startup Checklist – 1
What Vertical Market am I In?

 Web 2.0  Semicondutors
 Enterprise Software  Electronic Design
 Enterprise Hardware Automation
 Communciaton Hdw  Cleantech
 Communication Sftw
 Med Dev / Health Care
 Consumer Electronics
 Life Science / Biotech
 Game Software
 Personalized Medicine

60

Market Risk vs. Invention Risk

61

Startup Checklist - 2

 Market Risk?
 Technical Risk?
 Both?

62

Execution: Lots to Worry About

63

Startup Checklist - 3

 Opportunity Where does the idea come from?
 Innovation Where is the innovation?
 Customer Who is the User/Payer?
 Competition Who is the competitor/complementor?
 Sales What is the Channel to reach the customer?
 Marketing: How do you create end user demand?
 What does Biz Dev do? Deals? Partnerships? Sales?
 Business/Revenue Model(s) How do we organize to make money?
 IP/PatentsRegulatory Issues? How and how long?
 Time to Market How long does it take to get to market?
 Product Development Model How to you engineer it?
 Manufacturing What does it take to build it?
 Seed Financing How much? When?
 Follow-on Financing How much? When?
 Liquidity How much? When?

64

Execution: Very Different by Vertical

65

Market Risk Reduction Strategy

66

and the Business Plan

67

The Traditional Plan & Pitch
Since You Can’t Answer my real questions here’s the checklist

 Technology
 Team
 Product
 Opportunity
 Customer Problem
 Business Model
Better
 Customers

68

Business Plan Becomes the
Funding Slides

Business Seed or Fire
Concept Plan Series A Execute Founders

69

Why Don’t VC’s Believe
a Word You Say?

 What’s wrong with a business plan?
 Hypothesis are untested
 Execution Oriented
 Assumes hypothesis are facts
 Static
 No change upon contact with customer and market

70

What Are Early Stage
Investors Really Asking?
 Are you going to:
 Blow my initial investment?
 Or are you going to make me a ton of money?
 Are there customers?
 How many? Now? Later?
 Is there a profitable business model?
 Can it scale?

71

“Lessons Learned” Drives
Funding

Business Test Lessons
Concept Plan Hypotheses Learned Series A

Do this first instead of fund raising

72

Credibility Increases Valuation

 Customer Development and the Business Plan
 Extract the hypotheses from the plan
 Leave the building to test the hypothesis
 Present the results as:
“Lessons Learned from our customers”
 Iterate Plan

73

The Customer Development
Presentation
 Answer the implicit questions about the viability
of the business
 Tell the Discovery & Validation story
 Lessons Learned & “Our Customers Told Us”
 Graph some important upward trend

74

Customer Development:
Summary
 Parallel process to Product Development

 Hypothesis Testing

 Measurable Checkpoints

 Not tied to FCS, but to customer milestones

 Notion of Market Types to represent reality

 Emphasis is on learning & discovery before execution

75

The Customer Development Methodology

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