GET OUT OF THE BUILDING

 

Numbers tell a compelling story, but I always remind entrepreneurs that metrics are people, too. No matter how many intermediaries lie between a company and its customers, at the end of the day, customers are breathing, thinking, buying individuals. Their behavior is measurable and changeable. Even when one is selling to large institutions, as in a business-to-business model, it helps to remember that those businesses are made up of individuals. All successful sales models depend on breaking down the monolithic view of organizations into the disparate people that make them up.

As Steve Blank has been teaching entrepreneurs for years, the facts that we need to gather about customers, markets, suppliers, and channels exist only “outside the building.” Startups need extensive contact with potential customers to understand them, so get out of your chair and get to know them.

The first step in this process is to confirm that your leap-of-faith questions are based in reality, that the customer has a significant problem worth solving.8 When Scott Cook conceived Intuit in 1982, he had a vision—at that time quite radical—that someday consumers would use personal computers to pay bills and keep track of expenses. When Cook left his consulting job to take the entrepreneurial plunge, he didn’t start with stacks of market research or in-depth analysis at the whiteboard. Instead, he picked up two phone books: one for Palo Alto, California, where he was living at the time, and the other for Winnetka, Illinois.

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Calling people at random, he inquired if he could ask them a few questions about the way they managed their finances. Those early conversations were designed to answer this leap-of-faith question: do people find it frustrating to pay bills by hand? It turned out that they did, and this early validation gave Cook the confirmation he needed to get started on a solution.9

Those early conversations did not delve into the product features of a proposed solution; that attempt would have been foolish. The average consumers at that time were not conversant enough with personal computers to have an opinion about whether they’d want to use them in a new way. Those early conversations were with mainstream customers, not early adopters. Still, the conversations yielded a fundamental insight: if Intuit could find a way to solve this problem, there could be a large mainstream audience on which it could build a significant business.

Design and the Customer Archetype

 

The goal of such early contact with customers is not to gain definitive answers. Instead, it is to clarify at a basic, coarse level that we understand our potential customer and what problems they have. With that understanding, we can craft a customer archetype, a brief document that seeks to humanize the proposed target customer. This archetype is an essential guide for product development and ensures that the daily prioritization decisions that every product team must make are aligned with the customer to whom the company aims to appeal.

There are many techniques for building an accurate customer archetype that have been developed over long years of practice in the design community. Traditional approaches such as interaction design or design thinking are enormously helpful. To me, it has always seemed ironic that many of these approaches are highly experimental and iterative, using techniques such as rapid prototyping and in-person customer observations to guide designers’ work. Yet because of the way design agencies traditionally have been compensated, all this work culminates in a monolithic deliverable to the client. All of a sudden, the rapid learning and experimentation stops; the assumption is that the designers have learned all there is to know. For startups, this is an unworkable model. No amount of design can anticipate the many complexities of bringing a product to life in the real world.

In fact, a new breed of designers is developing brand-new techniques under the banner of Lean User Experience (Lean UX). They recognize that the customer archetype is a hypothesis, not a fact. The customer profile should be considered provisional until the strategy has shown via validated learning that we can serve this type of customer in a sustainable way.10