Are there any customers for your product?

I have been reading Steven Gary Blank’s book Four Steps to the Epiphany. This is best book I’ve yet read on how to launch a startup. What I appreciate most about it is the extent to which Blank makes clear that the rules for startups are very different than the rules for established businesses.

This is from page 36:

The idea that a startup builds its product for a small group of initial customers, rather than devising a generic mainstream spec, is radical. What follows is equally revolutionary.

On the day the company starts, there is a very limited customer input to a product specification. The company doesn’t know who its initial customers are (but it may think it knows) or what they will want as features. One alternative is to put Product Development on hold until the Customer Development team can find those customers. However, having a product you can demonstrate and iterate is helpful in moving the Customer Development process along. A more productive approach is to proceed with Product Development, with the feature list driven by the vision and experience of the company’s founders.

Therefore, the Customer Development model has your founding team take the product as spec’d and search to see if there are customers – any customers – who will buy the product exactly as you have defined it. When you do find those customers, you tailor the first release of the product so that it satisfies their needs.

The shift in thinking is important. For the first product in a startup, your initial purpose in meeting customers is not to gather feature requests so that you can change the product. Instead, your purpose in talking to customers is to find customers for the product you are already building.

If and only if, no customers can be found for the product as spec’d do you bring the features customers requested to the Product Development team. In the Customer Development model, then, feature request is by exception rather than rule. This eliminates the endless list of requests that often delay first customer ship and drive your product development team crazy.