Natalie Hodge MD FAAP
http://www.personalmedicine.com
” Your Doctor Comes to You”

Sean Murphy adds tremendous value for startups in setting them up “getting out of the building” and how to make sense of the data they’ve gathered.

He’s one consultant I personally know (I’m sure there are others) who doesn’t confuse his role with the founders. I think of his consulting firm as a “force-multiplier” for Customer Development.

steve

Without going into specifics I would suggest that you are making a key assumption in your analysis that other consultants have your business model and your compensation expectations. Other models are possible that provide value to startup teams and adequate compensation for outside consultants.

My understanding is that you work more in an ‘interim executive” capacity for venture backed startups that have achieved product/market fit and want to scale rapidly. An interim executive model clearly won’t work for very early stage firms. We work as an extension of a founding team that’s bootstrapping, often still in customer discovery / customer validation.

We understand how to provide value to a number of teams in parallel leveraging both face to face conversation and a variety of on-line collaboration tools. We support rehearsal, take part in, and de-brief conversations with prospects for customer discovery and customer validation. We also support a variety of cost effective methods for getting more customers. About 1/3 of our clients are outside of Silicon Valley now, we support teams not in the United States but in other parts of the world.

I can appreciate that you would not be attracted to the problems that we very much enjoy focusing on, but I think it’s unfortunate that you are suggesting that we cannot provide fair value to our customers for our compensation.

So I believe customer development can only effectively be “taught” to founders as a group. This can be as simple as reading “Four Steps to the Epiphany” or participating in more in depth workshops. Founders armed with the tools of customer development will get less incremental value from a “hands on” consultant. Still, I believe the need is there and most consultants have the expertise to fill the need; the problem is that their cost exceeds their value at this stage. I know some of the consultants have been doing this for a long time, so they may have figured out how to bridge this gap.

Knowing when, why and how to work with outside talent is everything.

To write someone off as a “technician” because their natural preference is not to do so seems shortsighted. Especially if the “technician” wants to get better at interacting with prospects and customers.

I am a big fan of the E-myth model but it focuses much more on operational excellence and the need for niche focus than the customer discovery and validation process.

Even in the scenario you suggest–a common one of two founders where one has a more “inside” orientation and the other a more “outside” focus–both founders need to interact with not only customers but serious prospects. So even in that case the “inside” founder cannot rely entirely on a partner to handle the customer development tasks.

In the same way that the “inside” founder needs the “outside” founders to be doing a certain amount of early use/testing. This allows for an independent assessment of how prospects are likely to react to the offering by someone who has some emotional distance from development challenges.

This is not a substitute for putting the offering into a prospects hands quickly. But an “outside” founder can more often avoid the mental reaction of “they are calling my baby ugly” and continue to ask probing questions on how to improve the offering instead of launching into a spirited defense of why it works the way that it does.

As an add I would say that some of the post could be adapted for intrapreneurial/startup situations within larger companies (which has been a key focus of mine). In many situations that I have been involved with there (e.g., exploring introduction of new products to existing customers), the consultant is helping the existing management team to get money committed, incubate and test the business ideas, innovate customer solutions that could take in the market, get a startup team in place (i.e., find the founders or build core team around the founders), etc. Once the core team is in place and the effort incubated, the consultant can start to phase out. Sometimes when doing these situations in larger companies there is more searching to be done required to find the right team mix. Support is also required because the larger company is essentially trying to start a new business while simultaneously doing their “day jobs”.

Lesson Learned.

Paul Spence
CEO
http://iwantmyname.com

I would suggest the technician find an equity partner that is an entrepreneur or they will never build much of a business. For definition on characteristics of an entrepreneur see http://www.e-myth.com/.

Joel Lessem
http://blog.firmex.com/

Building product is a lot more seductive because it feels like progress and is much easier than getting out of the building. But in probably 90% of the cases the existing state of the product is light-years ahead of the other components of the business model.

Many thanks for all your great insights.

In the fog of war, we may not able to see our real target.

One of the toughest jobs I have (as a custdev “teacher”) is convincing entrepreneurs that metrics do not replace in-person interviews. I would hazard a guess that the question is only asked by those who haven’t truly “got out of the building.” Those that have know the value.

Brant

“Founders get out of the building (physically or *virtually*) to test their hypotheses against reality.” [emphasis added]

I’m assuming the ‘virtually’ means on the phone, video chat, and other direct feedback methods rather than metrics, but I’d love to hear more on this. A future blog post perhaps?

As an interesting side-note, at Eric Ries’s Lean Intensive Alistair Croll and Sean Power (experts in web analytics) were asked whether or not “getting out of the building” was still relevant in the age of Web 2.0 metrics. Their response was an emphatic “yes”.

And if they go with you on customer discovery interviews or sales calls they may hear things that you don’t or, more importantly, hear what isn’t said.

Experienced consultants can also offer questions or alternate frames of reference that enrich your candidate pattern set or help you to become unstuck, especially at a team level. Outside advisors, experienced angel investors, visionary customers who are stakeholders in your success, and trusted members of a “kitchen cabinet” can also do this for you if you take the time to involve them. I would take advantage of every resource you have available to you to gain insight and speed learning.

Getting a startup to a working business model, like many things in life, is an open book test where collaboration is allowed: you don’t have to figure it all out on your own.