The Power of Customer Feedback: How Startups Benefit

Customer feedback is crucial for startups as it provides valuable insights into how the target market positions the company's products or services. By actively seeking out and listening to customer feedback, startups can identify areas for improvement, address any problems or concerns, and ultimately enhance the overall customer experience. Critically, customer feedback is essential for … Continue reading The Power of Customer Feedback: How Startups Benefit

Unlocking Customer Outcomes: The Key to Startup Success

One of the most challenging aspects of navigating startup development is identifying and validating customer-desired outcomes. Understanding the customer's needs can be difficult to determine as customers are not always able to articulate their desired results. Founders make several assumptions about these outcomes that need to be evaluated, prioritized, and validated through customer engagement, market … Continue reading Unlocking Customer Outcomes: The Key to Startup Success

CRM’s Essential Role in Early Venture Development

Summary Via ChatGPT. This article discusses the importance of implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy in the early stages of a startup. The author argues that CRM is not just about capturing customer data during the sales process, but also about establishing a customer-centric mindset and managing all relevant stakeholder relationships. The article suggests … Continue reading CRM’s Essential Role in Early Venture Development

Essentials of B2B Customer Discovery

Frequently, founders ask me to talk about the differences one encounters when building a venture that serves business customers instead of non-business consumers. While the overall process is somewhat agnostic for the target customer or business model, there are certainly differences to explore. This post will focus on the customer discovery process, starting with customer … Continue reading Essentials of B2B Customer Discovery

Why Startups Should Focus On Pre-Launch Metrics

Everyone agrees that measuring and monitoring startup performance is a critical success factor for fledgling enterprises. However, while much is written about measuring startup performance post-launch, there is less attention to pre-launch metrics. In this post, I make the case that establishing a disciplined pre-launch culture, manifested by a history of goal setting, measurement, monitoring, … Continue reading Why Startups Should Focus On Pre-Launch Metrics

Customer Experience Maps: A Holistic Approach

In the previous post, I highlighted the role that design thinking plays in problem identification and solution design. Within the design thinking approach, several tools and practices helpful to entrepreneurs as they seek an optimal solution for customers. These tools support the development, articulation, and documentation of your early assumptions about the customer's experience with … Continue reading Customer Experience Maps: A Holistic Approach

Selecting Your Early Customers

Deciding on which customers you should focus on as you launch your venture is an important decision. Getting this right can be the difference between the success or failure of your venture. Early in the venture realization process, you define who your potential customers are and whether they need your solution enough to pay for … Continue reading Selecting Your Early Customers

Customer Discovery: Surveying Early Customers

While interviewing customers is a preferred method for early customer discovery, there are many reasons to consider using a survey or questionnaire to solicit customer information about the problem, current solutions, and desired benefits. One of the significant benefits of online surveys is the ability to reach large numbers of customers in a relatively short … Continue reading Customer Discovery: Surveying Early Customers

Customer Discovery: Early Interviews

Introduction to Customer Discovery There are two stages of customer discovery in the venture realization process: 1) problem experience and; 2) solution experience. In the early stage of customer discovery, you are looking to validate assumptions about whether your venture idea is something specific customers need, want, and are willing to purchase. These assumptions are … Continue reading Customer Discovery: Early Interviews