Customer Motivated Entrepreneurship and the Lean Startup

As a hacker-founder (an entrepreneur who develops their own products), how familiar does this sound to you:

1. Have an awesome idea. Don’t tell anyone about it.
2. Decide to build it, convinced that everyone will love it.
3. Still don’t tell publicize it.
4. Keep working on the product. Not as wild about the idea anymore.
5. Come to some milestone in the product. Show it to one or two people.
6. Start to think about marketing. How are you going to market this? Haven’t really thought about this before…
7. Bleh, so many little remaining things to do.
8. Come up with another really great idea – even better!
9. Give up. Not like you had any users who gave a crap…
10. Move onto the next idea. See step 1.

I’ve been through this half a dozen times in the last two years alone. It sucks, as I look back on all the dead web applications and “startups” I’ve done. I still look back and think that some of them are still great ideas – in fact, similar products have come later that have been very successful.

No more. I’m not doing that again.

One of the main “lean startup” tenets is a focus on ensuring that customers want your product, making customer development more important than product development itself. As I was thinking about my next product (having built an awesome product previously, yet completely missed how to market it), I was interested in following this path myself.

Knowing how I work, an initial focus on customer development meant more than knowing that I’d be building a product that people wanted. Far more important than that, my belief is that, by gathering a following and users who actually want the product, I’d be motivated to continue it. I can’t give up if I have actual users, I’ll see it through to completion.

Here’s a generalized view of my method:

1. Come up with idea. Yes, this rocks.
2. Talk to as many people as possible about it initially. Gather feedback, generally positive.
3. Think heavily about my ideal customer, and figure out how to reach them.
4. Develop minimum viable product – in this case, a well designed landing page and screencast.
5. Make initial push to get users (and by users, I mean people signing up for updates via landing page).
6. Engage users.
7. Continue to network with anyone who is interested.

By step 6, something very different has happened. Without writing a line of code (for the real product) yet, I had interest – customers. Some findings:

• I’ve gained a strong following of people interested in the product.
• I’ve gathered commitments from a number of people to really use the product.
• I’ve validated my idea as well as I can without having an actual product to use with.
• Received interest from potential investors.
• Downside: With my particular product, I’ve received a good amount of feedback that in order to continue pursuing costumers, I really need to have something people can tinker with. However, I can continue with product development knowing that I’ll have people willing to give it a spin.

Looking to learn more? Check out my startup Structo – we’re a hosted database that enables web developers to build web applications faster.