How to do (and what to expect from) early stage customer development & sales
Everything I know from 4 years of intensive customer development & sales, boiled down into an 18 minutes talk I gave at HackFwd in Berlin.
HD video is here, normal is embedded below. I’m pretty happy with this one and think you won’t have heard the content elsewhere. Watch it!
PS. If you’re in London and want to learn more about this stuff, come hang out & work on it this Saturday.
Hey! I wrote a book about how to actually do custdev
It's about how to talk to customers without wasting your time.
Visit momtestbook.com to learn more and pre-order it.
My favorite part of the presentation was How to Mess Up Customer Development… I think doing the right research and asking the right questions is the foundation of any business development and where a lot of ideas fail. Good presentation.
This is an awesome presentation of the process Rob. Great suggestions for avoiding false positives. This is the double-edge sword of customer development – people love to help but they may give you false signals. I speak regularly with entrepreneurs who were excited by the early reaction from customers but tripped up by a false buy signal.
Great presentation! Thanks for posting. We are right in the middle of early stage customer development (as I like to call sales/activation prep) and you have so many useful tips I can’t wait to put into practice.
It reassuring to hear things we are doing exactly right (informalizing, and making our conversations casual & movement driven) and some things we need to do better (ask better questions).
While we haven’t launched yet – of course – I’ve been planning to send emails to the first 1000 sign-ups for quite some time. Such a simple, relevant, and easy to overlook idea. Cheers
Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Is that you?
I wish!
[...] I think that working nights & weekends is an awesome way to start doing customer development and answering the big questions about your business. You’ll have a much better starting point [...]
Great video Rob. Thanks!
Any chance your slides will be made available?
Cheers,
Fadi
[...] Rob Fitzpatrick: ask the right questions, write it down [...]
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thank thank thank you!
I’m doing plenty of what you say, feeling the strain of all the conversations. Loving the learning – totally loving it, but it is hard.
Thanks for sharing this and for helping me feel that I’m not alone.
Mike