Choose your customers
seths.blog
Choose your customers
It’s critical to start with the right set of early customers to kick off all the self-reinforcing growth cycles we’ve discussed above. You have to start by knowing who your best early customers will be — for productivity/collaboration companies that’s often knowledge workers on remote and distributed teams, and often engineers.
Medium • Zero to 1: Product Fundamentals for Go-To-Market
Founders: Find something that is both important to you and resonates with a group of people at this particular moment in time. In the early days you’ll need to frame your story—to recruits, to partners, to investors, and to the entire outside world—along those lines. Talk about why your company matters, not just what it does. Make sure your product... See more
D'arcy Coolican • Product Zeitgeist Fit: A Cheat Code for Spotting and Building the Next Big Thing | Andreessen Horowitz
Pick a customer instead of an idea: “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was that when you're starting a company, you often think you're picking an idea, but you're really picking a customer. It's actually pretty easy to change your idea, but it’s way harder to change the customer you're serving,” says Agrawal.
Superhuman
Choose the people who want what you’re offering. Choose the people most open to hearing your message. Choose the people who will tell the right other people …
Seth Godin • This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See
I recommend thinking about a few categories: The typical customer you envision if you get traction with your idea Your early adopter, i.e. the people who will take a chance on your product before anyone else Critical partners for distribution, fulfillment, or other parts of your business
Giff Constable • Talking to Humans: Success starts with understanding your customers
As organizations have begun to coalesce around projects, they’ve made a startling discovery: the starting part is harder than it looks. How to invent and choose and stick with or abandon ideas, how to select and predict and forecast the future of a project—this is all difficult.
Seth Godin • Poke the Box
You'll note that I've started with you as the center of your business building process, and there's a reason for this. Part of the challenge of getting something started is that you look externally into the world and you see all sorts of things that you might do. That array of choices keeps you from doing something.