Getting Started (Chapters 1 & 2)

Die Autoren erinnern uns daran, dass der alte Produkt-Rollout-Prozess für Startups völlig falsch ist. Dieser Prozess ist angemessen, wenn die Kunden bekannt und der Markt gut definiert ist. Dies ist bei Startups oft nicht der Fall.

Customer development, then, is very important for startups, and there are a number of phases in Blank and Dorf’s framework:

1. Kundenerkennung: Hypothesen entwickeln und mit Kunden testen.
2. Kundenvalidierung: Testen Sie die Verkäufe, sehen Sie, ob die Leute kaufen, und sehen Sie, ob Sie skalieren können.
3. Kundenerstellung: Marketing.
4. Firmengebäude: Übergang zu einem nachhaltigen Unternehmen.

Each step is iterative and can be repeated, as needed. Furthermore, at any point, a pivot or change of strategy may be necessary. And that’s OK — it’s not a failure.

Step One: Customer Discovery (Chapters 3–7)

You have to understand your customers; don’t make assumptions about them. One of the seminal points that Blank and Dorf make (as do many others) is that customers do not live where you work. In order to meet them at their level, you have to “[g]et out of the building.”

Startups sollten das Ziel haben, über ein Minimum Viable Product (MVP) das erste Produkt für einen kleinen Zielmarkt zu entwickeln. Das Ziel des MVP ist es, ein Produkt für die frühen Adapter (genannt Frühvangelisten here) to play with. Putting out a MVP forces developers to focus on the important features, not the bells and whistles. The product can be refined once there’s customer feedback.

Geschäftsmodellplanung: Die Autoren empfehlen die Geschäftsmodell-Leinwand (laid out in Alexander Osterwalder’s Geschäftsmodellgenerierung) als gutes Instrument, um zu erklären, wie das Unternehmen Geld verdienen will. Es gibt eine Reihe von Komponenten für die Leinwand:

Use this tool beyond a one-time plan and update it once a week. Over time, you’ll have a record of the company’s evolution.

Größe des Marktes: Wenn es darum geht, die Größe Ihres Marktes einzuschätzen, können Sie wie folgt vorgehen:

You’ve got to do research here. Look at industry reports, press releases, libraries — anywhere you can get metrics that help you gauge the size of the market. It’s going to be tricky to estimate brand new markets, so consider looking at adjacent markets and see if you can find any comparable companies.

Testing Customer’s Problems: Sie müssen das Gebäude verlassen, um Folgendes zu entdecken:

Im Großen und Ganzen umfasst der Problemerkennungsprozess die folgenden fünf Schritte (und beachte: dieser Prozess geht bei Web-/Mobile-Produkten schneller als bei physischen Produkten):

Testen Ihrer Lösung: Nach dem Testen von Kundenproblemen testet diese Phase die Lösung, und die Autoren beschreiben hier fünf Schritte:

Überprüfung des Geschäftsmodells: Diese Phase des Customer Discovery-Prozesses, die noch nicht am Start ist, beinhaltet die Beantwortung von drei kritischen Fragen:

Und Sie haben es erraten, an dieser Stelle sollten Sie noch einmal innehalten und entscheiden, ob Sie schwenken oder fortfahren.

Step Two: Customer Validation (Chapters 8–12)

Customer validation means test selling at every point in the process (all the while keeping costs low — it’s not the time to scale up yet). Blank and Dorf detail four phases in the customer validation process:

Gründer kann nicht hier aus der Ferne führen; sie müssen direkt in den Prozess eingebunden werden.

Phase I — Get ready to sell

Steps for this phase of customer validation really are different for each channel, so it’s helpful to consider each separately.

Bei physischen Produkten beginnt diese Phase mit einer Positionierungsaussage: einer Botschaft (sie sollte prägnant, aber überzeugend sein), die erklärt, warum die Leute Ihr Produkt kaufen sollten. Anschließend sollten kundenorientierte Vertriebs- und Marketingmaterialien weitgehend aus den Informationen entwickelt werden, die Sie in der Hypothese erstellt haben, die Sie für den Kundenfindungsprozess erstellt haben. (Denken Sie daran, dass die Gewinnung von Kunden in diesem Kanal ein vierstufiger Prozess ist, bei dem es um Bewusstsein, Überlegung, Interesse und Kauf geht.) Die Autoren empfehlen, dass dies ein günstiger Zeitpunkt ist, um Vertriebsprofis an Bord zu holen.

You and your team will also need to develop a sales channel roadmap which covers the organizations in the organizational food chain, the relationships in the distribution channel, and how money moves in the channels. When it comes to managing channels, work on the relationships with your channel partners. Think about what you need from them and what they need from you. And don’t expect your channel partners to help generate demand.

Then you will develop the sales roadmap, which accounts for every step from the first sales call to the contract signing. Keep in mind what you’ve learned about the customer and revisit some of the materials (especially the organization and influence maps) you developed back in the customer discovery stage. Make a model of the purchase process, and identify key influencers.

A Customer Access Map can help you identify organizations that customers belong to (if you’re selling to the public) or key deciders in the organization (if you’re selling to a business). Put all the maps next to each other, also considering the sales strategy, and write an ImplementationPlan that shows everything that has to happen before selling your product.

Bei Web-/Mobile-Produkten beinhaltet die Get Ready to Sell-Phase zunächst die Verfeinerung von Plänen und die Entwicklung von Tools zur Akquise und Aktivierung von Kunden. Erinnern: Erwerb ist, wenn der Kunde zum ersten Mal von dem Produkt hört und Aktivierung is when customers participate, enroll, or do something. Don’t launch the Acquire effort unless the Activation program is ready for customers, and the key to the latter is engagement. Also, measure everything!

Then, using the information you’ve gathered to build previous versions, you’re going to build a high fidelity MVP, which will have more features than the last one. It’s definitely more polished, but it’s still not the complete, finished product. Be sure to capture as much data as possible on customer reaction to the new MVP. From there, collect data, analyze and optimize — so it goes from the moment a web/mobile business opens its virtual doors until the day it dies.

Use the customer relationships hypothesis to guide your selection of metrics to track and prioritize the metrics. Only track things you can measure and improve: acquisition (How many visitors to your site? Were they referred from another site?); activation (How many activations? What pages did they look at on the site?); and referrals (How many people were referred from existing users? What’s the acceptance rate of these referrals?) Use a dashboard or something similar to keep an eye on the data. Speaking of data, you need someone to crunch the numbers, and Blank and Dorf recommend hiring a data analytics chief. This person should be in senior management and they should have clout. It can be someone already on your team or someone new.

Finally, in an author recommendation that is applicable to both physical and web/mobile products, recruit and keep only board members who can help you. Do they have important connections? Do they have really good ideas that could help the company? Lots of times, it’s helpful to have customers on the board. They can bring their perspective.

Phase II — Get out of the building and sell

In this phase, you are validating your business model hypothesis, but you are still testing (by making real sales). Don’t try to scale up yet — the object of your sales is to test your business model.

For physical products, you don’t need a lot of customers, just a few. Remember those early adopters/Frühvangelisten? These people are your natural market. But don’t forget that what motivates them probably isn’t what motivates your average Joe. There are different kinds of customers (for example, early evaluators, earlyvangelists, scalable customers, and mainstream customers), and you should have a separate strategy for each of them.

Das Kundeninteresse an physischen Produkten wird getestet, indem man sieht, wie viel die Leute für das glänzende neue Ding bezahlen. Geben Sie den Leuten vielleicht einen Rabatt vom (was Sie sagen) dem vollen Preis, aber nicht zu viel. (Vorhersehbar irrational von Philip E. Tetlock und Dan Gardner has some great insight on pricing schemes.) In any event, get out there and sell. Once you have sales, you will have data. Collect it all. But pay attention: Did you get enthusiastic customer response with your Shiny New Thing™? Not so much? Is it because of something that needs to be fixed with the test sell, or is it something with the product? Watch for your pivot or proceed moments here.

Your approach to sales will depend on whether you’re selling to consumers or companies. With companies, you’re trying to reach executives with decision-making power. With the public, you’re segmenting the market. Pull out your old Sales Roadmap; that’s an important way to communicate with your sales VP. Write the roadmap as a flow chart, and include each step of the process. Don’t forget: after a sale is made, someone has to follow up with the actual transaction and see that the customer gets their thing. Make sure this is part of your roadmap.

Finally, once you have customers, you can test the sales channel. Approach a potential channel partner and share some of your metrics and projections; tell them your idea. You should have questions for them about their channel — for example, what kind of percentage do they want? They might go for your offer right away, or they might want to test your idea first by maybe selling your product in their stores first to see if they do well. Check out a number of different potential channel partners.

Shifting gears, for web/mobile products, you need to prepare optimization plans and tools. Optimization is all about getting more out of everything — for example, if you have a 6% activation rate, try to push it up to 10%. Try for measurable improvement in each thing you measure. This is a continuous process that won’t end until the business either folds or goes public. Optimization should be focused on increasing volume, reducing cost per activated customer, and increasing the conversion of visitors to users. The authors offer some advice on optimization testing:

For web/mobile products, the strategy for getting more customers depends on your business model. For example, subscription services might offer a free trial to new users. Be sure to attend to issues: what’s important, what’s disappointing, what results in the best customers, etc. Test a wide range of incentives and discounts. And don’t optimize too many things at once. You need to be certain about causes and effects.

But do optimize the “keep” and “grow” components. It’s cheaper to keep old customers than to get new ones. When focusing on “keep,” go back to your customer relationship hypothesis, where you developed some ideas for customer retention (loyalty programs and so forth). Launch a few of these. Be sure to track everything. Some programs are cheaper than others, so track your costs. In the “grow” segment, get your customers to buy more (perhaps give discounts for large orders and similar tactics), and have your existing customers draw in new customers.

Finally, you need partners to drive traffic to your new website, and there are strategies for using partner sites to promote yours. But don’t be surprised if potential partners aren’t excited by your cold call. Try to emphasize the benefits of partnering with you.

Phase III — Positioning phase

Your positioning should match your market. For existing markets, you want to be different, yet credible. You want to solve a problem that’s important to people.

Für einen neuen Markt möchten Sie Ihre Vision erklären. Was versucht Ihr Unternehmen zu ändern?

At this point, go back and look at the Positioning Statement you wrote during the customer validation phase. How did it survive the validation process? If the customers didn’t love it, do you understand the reasons why? Also, meet with the key influencers that you identified back in the customer discovery phase. Now is the time to meet with them. Test to see if these influencers and other industry analysts will say good things about you.

Finally, don’t let anyone tell you that you need a PR agency — your customer development people, with input from the product development people, can do the job just fine at this point. But do conduct a position audit to see how others see your company and your product. This will give you a baseline to compare against.

Phase IV — Pivot and/or proceed

This is probably the most critical pivot and proceed you will have. Review and analyze all the material you’ve generated; make sure that there are solid answers to the hypotheses. Look at your business model and how it’s changed through this process. Do your metrics provide evidence that this is a scalable endeavor that could turn a profit? This is important, and the authors provide insight into “Metrics that Matter” (for example, total number of units sold, selling price, etc.).

Überprüfen Sie Ihre Finanzmodelle. Die Umsatzwachstumskurven sind je nach Markttyp unterschiedlich: Das Wachstum eines neuen Marktunternehmens wird in einer Grafik wie ein Hockeyschläger aussehen, zuerst langsam und dann abhebend; ein bestehender Markt weist eine stetige Wachstumsrate auf. Die Zahlen, die Sie haben, sind Ihre besten Schätzungen, aber denken Sie daran, dass nichts sicher ist, selbst so spät im Spiel. Bewerten Sie auch das Geschäftsmodell, das Wertversprechen und die Produktbereitstellung neu, um sicherzustellen, dass sie richtig passen. Die Einnahmen sollen hoch und die Kosten gering sein.

In short, look at everything again. It can be hard after all this work to go back to the drawing board, but it’s OK if that’s what you must do. Otherwise, if everything checks out, take a night off. No, make that a week. You’ll need the rest. There is still plenty more work ahead.