The tactics you can use to create demand for a new product differ significantly when you operate in a new vs. existing market.  Make A New Market If you are creating a new market, I’d start by watching a few instructional videos. The first is Dave McC…

Having read this blog I thought you may be interested in this forum for start-ups…it is call the microFunding Exchange and connects inventors with business managers with investors through the network…it is really interesting and currently helping a lot of people; by either get their ideas noticed (inventors), giving managers fabulous ideas to work with and prove commercially viable (business managers), or by Creating reduced risk, commercially proven, investment opportunities (investors)…hope you find it of interest!

Helena

No advice is applicable in all cases.
Startups are – and will remain – an art, not a science. That’s why early stage companies aren’t run by accountants with spreadsheets.
That said, the Customer Development process is just one of many ways to optimize the “hypothesis – feedback iteration loop.”
Most successful entrepreneurs do this by instinct without having a formal process. The Customer Development process was a way of simply documenting _one_ path through the process.

I think if you look at the history of what became Twitter, Paypal, and others you’d see a form of an iteration loop without a formal methodology.

In summary, the Customer Development process is there as a tool for those who feel that’s it’s improvement over having no roadmap.

steve

Whilst agreeing with your views on customer product validation, I’m still not convinced your advice is applicable in all cases. Sometimes customers don’t realize they need a product until you give it to them.

I would be very curious to hear the (hypothetical) suggestions you would have given to twitter’s founders, for example.

Thanks.

It’s a tough balance to strike, because as Steve Jobs has proven, the market doesn’t always know what it wants in advance, so you can’t just allow your customers to dictate your product strategy.

But if it was easy, everyone would be a successful entrepreneur.

We launched Postling 2.5 weeks ago, positioning it as a tool designed to help small businesses effectively manage their social media efforts. The problem is that our messaging on the home page shouts “Write Once, Publish Everywhere”. So while we do talk about how we save you time (5X faster to blog / tweet / upload a photo using Postling, which is equal to 8 minutes per or 3 hrs a month or saving you $3 for every $1 you spend) and how we aggregate comments to your posts regardless of platform and how we have a smart workflow that puts you in control…. customers don’t pick it up. They see the big “Write Once, Publish Everywhere” and immediately think “this is ping.fm or posterous, but you have to pay for it”.

So we are in the process of redesigning the homepage to better point out how we solve problems, save time, and better communicate our positioning.