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09/09/11 | Uncategorized

10 Things I’ve Learned About Customer Development

By Cindy Alvarez (Head of Products and Customer Development, KISSmetrics)
 

  1. Whatever people say they will pay for it is wrong.
  2. If someone says, “I wouldn’t personally use it, but I bet other people would”, no one will use it.
  3. The answer to any question that starts with “do you want” or “are you concerned about” will always be “yes”.
  4. If someone says “maybe it’s just me, but…” — it’s not. Especially if it pertains to your product being hard to use or your marketing being unclear.
  5. If you want to charge money for your product, don’t talk to people who try to get everything for free. (They might eventually be customers, but not until your product goes more mainstream or becomes a defacto standard.)
  6. What features your customers ask for is never as interesting as why they want them.
  7. Almost anyone will do almost anything for you as long as: the request is short, you are enthusiastic, they don’t have to make any decisions that require more than 1 minute of thought.
  8. The two driving forces of purchase and usage behavior are apathy and the desire to avoid looking/feeling stupid.
  9. You can’t build a good product if you don’t genuinely like the people who’ll be using it. You don’t have to be like them, but you have to like them.
  10. Whenever you start thinking “this is a lot more complicated than I originally thought”, you should immediately stop and find a sounding board. You are probably either wrong or overthinking things, and an external brain will see it much faster than you.

This post was originally posted at The Experience is the Reason.

About the guest blogger: Cindy Alvarez is the head of products and customer development for KISSmetrics, where she is currently building two products (KISSmetrics and KISSinsights) using customer development / lean startup techniques. Cindy is passionate about helping startups succeed through early focus on product management, user experience, and customer outreach. She blogs at The Experience is the Product. Follow her on Twitter at @cindyalvarez.

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