Getting Started (Chapters 1 & 2)

作者提醒我们，旧的产品推出流程对初创公司来说是完全错误的。当客户已知且市场定义明确时，该过程是合适的。对于初创公司而言，情况通常并非如此。

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

1. 客户发现：提出假设并与客户一起测试。
2. 客户验证: 测试销售，看看人们是否会购买，看看你是否可以扩大规模。
3. 客户创造： 营销。
4. 公司大楼：过渡到可持续发展的企业。

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.”

初创公司的目标应该是通过最小可行产品 (MVP) 为小目标市场开发第一个产品。 MVP 的目标是为早期的适配器（称为 早期布道者 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.

商业模式规划: 作者推荐 商业模式画布 (laid out in Alexander Osterwalder’s 商业模式生成) 作为帮助解释公司计划如何赚钱的好工具。画布有许多组件：

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.

市场规模：在估计您的市场规模时，一种思考方式如下：

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：你必须走出大楼才能发现：

从广义上讲，问题发现过程包括以下五个步骤（并注意：这个过程对于网络/移动产品比实体产品更快）：

测试您的解决方案：在客户问题测试之后，这个阶段测试解决方案，作者在这里详细说明了五个步骤：

验证商业模式：还没有启动，客户发现过程的这个阶段涉及回答三个关键问题：

而且，您猜对了，此时您应该再次暂停并决定是旋转还是继续。

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:

创始人 不能 从远处引到这里；他们必须直接参与过程。

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.

对于实体产品，这个阶段从定位声明开始：一条信息（应该简洁但引人注目）解释人们为什么应该购买你的产品。然后，以客户为中心的销售和营销材料应主要根据您在为客户发现过程创建的假设中生成的信息开发。 （请记住，在这个渠道中获取客户是一个意识、考虑、兴趣和购买的四个阶段的过程。）作者建议现在是让销售专业人士加入的好时机。

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.

对于网络/移动产品，准备销售阶段包括首先完善计划和开发工具以获取和激活客户。记住： 获得 是当客户第一次听说产品并且 激活 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/早期布道者? 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.

客户对实物产品的兴趣是通过查看人们愿意为闪亮的新事物支付多少来测试的。也许给人们从（你说的是）全价的折扣，但不要太多。 (可预见的非理性 经过 菲利普·E·泰洛克 和 丹·加德纳 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.

对于一个新市场，您想解释一下您的愿景。你的公司试图改变什么？

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.).

查看您的财务模型。收入增长曲线因市场类型而异：新市场公司的增长在图表上看起来就像曲棍球棒，先慢后腾；现有市场显示出稳定的增长速度。您拥有的数字是您最好的猜测，但请记住，没有什么是确定的，即使是在游戏的后期。还要重新评估商业模式、价值主张和产品交付，以确保它们是合适的。收益要高，成本要低。

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.