A New Kind of Business
Customer Development is essentially practical. It’s advocated as a JFDI approach that “just works”. Samuel L Jackson standing at the top of the stairs with a handheld megaphone shouting “Get out of the building!”
Which is perhaps all very well if you’re bootstrapping a startup but makes me wonder not just whether but how and why it works.
The answer is two fold. The immediate response, something to do with staying grounded in what customers want and not wasting time developing the wrong product, is only half the story. More interesting is the focus on repeatability.
Customer discovery and validation are the steps most people associate with #custdev. However, getting out of the building to check you have customers is really only a first step because you (as in you the individual) are at the heart of these early stages. To build a business you need to scale and that means people doing stuff and making decisions without you being there.
This is where the repeatability of the sales roadmap is important. Developing a roadmap that your sales team can follow without you is what lets you step back, delegate and grow. This is reinforced by the focus on mission-centric culture. The sales roadmap is, in a sense, to a salesperson what DNA is to a cell.
As Stephen Wolfram’s classic A New Kind of Science has shown, small functional loops can yield huge richness and complexity. Your company mission is like the ruleset of a cellular automaton.
Customer development works not just because it helps avoid wasting your time but also because it has repeatability at its core. Once again, we find the Timeless Way of Building at the heart of 21st Century business.
