Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts

Chapter 17. Stop Validating Your Product

Laura Klein

I talk to a lot of very small companies that are trying to do customer development, and the conversations are often the same. The entrepreneur explains that the company is working on a fabulous product, and they want to figure out a) if anybody wants to buy the product and b) if they need to change anything about the product so that more people will buy it.

The entrepreneurs always ask questions like, “How will I know if I have talked to enough people?” and “How do I know if the people who like it are just early adopters?” and “How do I know if I should change the product in response to feedback or if I should just keep trying to find the right market?” The ones who have already been out in the field trying to conduct these interviews all have a sort of glazed, terrified look.

These are all really important questions. I’m going to give you a way to avoid having to ask most of them:

Stop trying to validate your product.

Now, I fully expect a bunch of people to stop reading here and totally miss the point of this post, but for those of you who stick it out, I promise this will make sense in a minute.

The trick is, it is far, far easier to conduct customer development before you have settled on a product or even an idea for a problem.

Why is that? Well, think about products as solutions to problems. Sometimes that “problem” is “I’m sort of bored while I’m waiting for the train,” and the unexpected solution is ...