Getting Started (Chapters 1 & 2)

Les auteurs nous rappellent que l'ancien processus de déploiement de produit est totalement erroné pour les startups. Ce processus est approprié lorsque les clients sont connus et que le marché est bien défini. Ce n'est souvent pas le cas pour les startups.

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

1. Découverte client: développer des hypothèses et les tester avec des clients.
2. Validation client : testez les ventes, voyez si les gens achèteront et voyez si vous pouvez augmenter.
3. Création client: commercialisation.
4. Bâtiment de l'entreprise: transition vers une entreprise durable.

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.”

Les startups doivent viser à développer le premier produit pour un petit marché cible via un produit minimum viable (MVP). L'objectif du MVP est d'obtenir un produit pour les premiers adaptateurs (appelé premiers évangélistes 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.

Planification du modèle d'affaires: Les auteurs recommandent le Canevas du modèle commercial (laid out in Alexander Osterwalder’s Génération de modèles commerciaux) comme un bon outil pour aider à expliquer comment l'entreprise envisage de gagner de l'argent. Le canevas comporte un certain nombre de composants :

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.

Taille du marché: Lorsqu'il s'agit d'estimer la taille de votre marché, une façon de procéder est la suivante :

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: Il faut sortir du bâtiment pour découvrir :

En gros, le processus de découverte de problèmes comprend les cinq étapes suivantes (et notez: ce processus est plus rapide pour les produits web/mobiles que pour les produits physiques) :

Tester votre solution: Après le test du problème client, cette phase teste la solution, et les auteurs détaillent cinq étapes ici :

Vérification du modèle économique: Toujours pas au lancement, cette phase du processus de découverte client consiste à répondre à trois questions cruciales :

Et, vous l'avez deviné, à ce stade, vous devriez à nouveau faire une pause et décider de pivoter ou de continuer.

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:

Fondateurs ne peut pas conduire à distance ici; ils doivent être directement impliqués dans le processus.

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.

Pour les produits physiques, cette phase commence par l'élaboration d'un énoncé de positionnement : un message (il doit être concis mais convaincant) qui explique pourquoi les gens devraient acheter votre produit. Ensuite, les supports de vente et de marketing axés sur le client doivent être développés en grande partie à partir des informations que vous avez générées dans l'hypothèse que vous avez créée pour le processus de découverte du client. (N'oubliez pas que l'acquisition de clients dans ce canal est un processus en quatre étapes de sensibilisation, de considération, d'intérêt et d'achat.) Les auteurs recommandent que le moment soit propice pour impliquer les professionnels de la vente.

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.

Pour les produits Web/mobiles, la phase Get Ready to Sell implique d'abord d'affiner les plans et de développer des outils pour acquérir et activer des clients. Rappelles toi: acquisition c'est lorsque le client entend parler du produit pour la première fois et Activation 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/premiers évangélistes? 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.

L'intérêt des clients pour les produits physiques est testé en voyant combien les gens paieront pour la nouvelle chose brillante. Peut-être donner aux gens une remise sur (ce que vous dites est) le plein prix, mais pas trop. (Irrationnel prévisible par Philippe E. Tetlock et 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.

Pour un nouveau marché, vous voulez expliquer votre vision. Qu'est-ce que votre entreprise essaie de changer?

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.).

Revoyez vos modèles financiers. Les courbes de croissance des revenus sont différentes selon le type de marché : la croissance d'une nouvelle entreprise de marché ressemblera à un bâton de hockey sur un graphique, lente au début puis décollant ; un marché existant affiche un taux de croissance constant. Les chiffres que vous avez sont votre meilleure estimation, mais rappelez-vous que rien n'est certain, même si tard dans la partie. Réévaluez également le modèle commercial, la proposition de valeur et la livraison du produit pour vous assurer qu'ils sont la bonne solution. Les revenus doivent être élevés et les coûts faibles.

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.