What is Customer development?

It is a term coined by entrepreneur and professor “Steve blank”- took direct aim at the outdated, “build it, and they will come” waterfall method of building products and companies.

Customer development process is a way where you collect your hypothesis about your business and product.

It starts by creating a business model canvas shaping yourhypotheses making them visible. Then go out of the building and start to talk with your customers, partners and vendors. Talking to customers should follow a process, not just randomly going out, you need to Design, make experiments and get Data and more importantly get customer insights.

Customer development is focused on collecting continues feedback that will have an impact on the direction of a product and business, every step of the way.

Blank first defined customer development in his book “The four steps to the Epiphany” and refined his idea with Bob Dorf in the startup Owner’s Manual. His definition of a startup is one of the most important concepts in his Work.

4 Steps of the customer development

1- Customer Discovery [SEARCH]

This where you structure your hypotheses and get out of the building to test your assumptions about whether other people have the same problem you think they have.

2- Customer validation [SEARCH]

Where you see if your proposed solution matches what you think the customer problem was. Testing the market fit.

In the above 2 steps, we are searching for a valid business Model. We can pivot between these 2 steps if needed once we learn more about the customer problem and feedback.

After finding your repeatable scalable business model then you can go the EXECUTION phase of customer development.

3- Customer creation [EXECUTION]

This where you start create end-user demands and drive that demand into the company’s sales channel.

4- Company building [EXECUTION]

This where the company transitions form its informal, learning and discovery-oriented customer development team into formal departments with Sales, Marketing, business development and so on …

Conclusion

“A startup is an organization formed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.”

Anything you are thinking about customers and the markets is nothing more than a guess, an hypothesis.

The goal of a customer development process is simply to take the hypotheses about your business and product and see if there is a customer of a market outside the building.