Visionary customers

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I have been reading Steven Gary Blank’s book Four Steps to the Epiphany. He does a great job of bringing out how much startups are different from large, established companies. When you are launching a startup, you do not pitch to mainstream customers, but rather, you go looking for a very special kind of customer. This is from page 33:

In a traditional product management and marketing process the goal is to develop a Marketing Requirements Document (MRD) for engineering. The MRD contains the sum of all the possible customer feature requests, prioritized in a collaborative effort between Marketing, Sales and Engineering. Marketing holds focus groups, analyzes sales data from the field, and looks at customer feature requests and complaints. This information leads to requested features that are added to the product specification, and the engineering team builds these features in the next release.

While this process is rational for an established company entering an existing market, it is folly for startups. Why? In established companies, the MRD process ensures that engineering will build a product that appeals to an existing market. But in either case the customers and their needs are known. In a startup, the first product is not designed to satisfy a mainstream customer. No startup can afford the engineering effort or the time to build a product with every feature that mainstream customer needs in its first release. The product would take years to get to market and be obsolete by the time it arrives. A successful startup solves this conundrum by focusing its development and early selling efforts on a very small group of early customers who have bought into the startup’s vision. It is this small group of visionary customers who will give the company the feedback necessary to add features into follow-on releases.

Post external references

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    http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/0976470705
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