atopiler

Amazing! That is the true essence of customer development.

When you walk into a hardware store and ask for a 2-inch drill bit, it's not the tool you really want. What you really want is a 2-inch hole in the wall.

Agree 100%. Great analogy.

"You'll never create amazing products with this mentality..."

I think that this kinda misses the point. If you're only building the things they explicitly ask for, then yes, you're right. However, customer development isn't mean to track what your users want and cover their expectations; it's to uncover the biggest pain points/real problems to come up with amazing solutions for - what's actually _worth_ pursuing and potentially building? How exactly those solutions manifest themselves often times does not come directly from customers, but the amazing ones are just as often inspired by insights gleaned from customer development.

The article you shared actually backs up my point exactly. Example: what could be obvious to one of your customers can end up being amazing to you and your other customers. In practice, I've found this dynamic play out time and time again.

That's a fantastic analogy!

I have to whole-heartedly disagree with this. Customer development and feedback don't just apply to short-term marketing and minor-point improvements. That couldn't be further from the truth.

The "They'll tell you what to build" isn't meant to be taken literally. If you listen and try to truly understand people's problems, they'll guide you towards the most useful solutions. Coming up with those solutions is still up to you in most cases, though.

Re: Apple - they understood the real problems that their potential customers had. No, customers didn't come and tell them to go and build a device like the iPhone. However, from understanding the market and the pain points that people had with mobile phones, Apple was able to identify an opportunity to enter a new market and disrupt it.

The point is to talk to people to know whether something you want to build is actually going to be great before you go and build it. Most of the time when people go and build what they think is "great" they end up realizing that nobody actually cares. It's a sure-fire way to waste a ton of time of money, which for startups, are the two scarcest resources you have.

Would recommend you check out "The entrepreneurs guide to customer development"!

Customer Development is a process that's really meant to be applied to prospective customers. The whole point is to figure out what problems the market needs, and ultimately what kind of solutions there might actually be a market for.

Instead of building something and then going to people and asking if it's useful, find out what a large segment of the market would find useful first.

Get out of the building and talk to actual people - create simple experiments to help you prove whether a market actually exists. Validate your assumptions before building. Follow the Lean Startup methodology :)

Absolutely - huge thanks for reading and for the thoughtful replies!

Very true. The helicopter vs. rush hour example is kind of like finding the holy grail, and that's what you strive for. In practice, the majority the improvements you can extract from these conversations end up being much smaller. But many small improvements compound and also help create the invaluable customer feeling of "Hey, I feel like the team behind this product really gets me!"

Also, well put: "You probably don't know better than them AND they probably don't know what they want."

Boom shakalaka! Perfect quote.

Great points! Being willing to listen is step 1. That's the product culture that needs to exist first and foremost. Completely agree with you: knowing what to do with the feedback you receive, and how to interpret it in order to innovate and solve real problems is the key that I firmly believe drives the ultimate success of a product. That's a product development/design problem that's alluded to in the middle of the article, but hard to really do it justice in a few small blurbs. Feels like a good topic to be the subject of its own stand-alone post as a follow-up to this one :)

"Part 2: Listen to Your Customers, but Don't Do Everything They Say" haha.

Couldn't agree more. Very very well said.

Thanks for the comment. I totally hear you - it irked me a bit too at first, but ultimately I thought to myself - the feature was out in their production environment already, and the chances of this really actually having any effect on Pinterest were pretty slim to none. If I'm wrong, then perhaps they have bigger problems.

Think about how much more valuable this test data would be though.. if you have people using this heavily despite the fact that they have to go through this whole process every time they want to block someone, I think that would say a lot about how important and needed this feature really is.

For what's probably a really small percentage of the Pinterest user base that actually has the patience and skill to use it, they probably really need this feature. Otherwise, I expect most people to pretty much just say, "Oh, cool", and let it be a neat "easter-egg" type of thing.

Anyway, I totally get where you're coming from, and agree with you that it's probably not that big of a deal :)

You're right about the tone- I didn't mean it to come off that way, but I guess it did. I'm sure Pinterest isn't doing it to spite users.. and I agree they are likely testing the feature.. or more likely preparing to start testing it. I tried it out myself to make sure it worked, and given that it's been one of the highly anticipated features I just thought, hey.. why not- let's give people what they want.

Love it.. nothing replaces or beats amazing personality that resonates with fans and leaves an impression. Kudos to Lyft for putting themselves out there. You might put off one or two people, but you'll gain many more raving fans that will spread your message and tell your story.

Awesome complementary wisdom to a great post. Thanks Frank.

I think you're right that they track this very closely internally. You hit the nail on the head with LTV - with the amount they spent to acquire what they already have, the outlook for clearing that LTV hurdle doesn't look that bad.

Another great point - churn is their biggest concern. They need to continue to keep the product relevant somehow so people who do actually read and buy continue to come back, or figure out a way to convert more inactive subscribers somehow. They just started a loyalty program that could bear fruit, but only time will tell.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Jacob. That's definitely a great way to look at it.. At the very least you'll also see how many Groupon's it takes to cover and then better understand what that % repeat number needs to be. Like you, I would assume the number is positive, but I don't think it will ever be negative as margins will continue to deteriorate (gross margins from Groupon's perspective, that is).

I think you nailed it - and coined a new term in the process!