The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany

“The second most desired outcome is the realization that there is no market...” #CustDev #LeanStartup http://bit.ly/a60evp

If you are branded by media and analysts in a way that confuses customers or lumps you with existing products incorrectly, you may never be able to undo the damage.

In a Nutshell: A product with the fewest number of features needed to achieve a specific objective, and users are willing to “pay” in some form of a scarce resource.

Your positioning will form the basis of your communications with all of your constituents, including customers, investors, partners, employees, etc. For your customer, the goal of positioning is to have them understand what benefit they will receive from you and why you are better than everyone else.

Word of mouth regarding products works best among those who share a need and a means to communicate a solution. “Access to each other” indicates a common methodology to reach them. Indirect knowledge (e.g., PR, testimonials, etc.) of like individuals buying a product is a powerful influence. One

Some entrepreneurs would rather nurse their doomed prized possession – the Grand Idea – rather than learning quickly that there is no market for it.

Launching in an existing market also requires millions of marketing dollars to compete with the existing players who hope to squash you. If you don’t have millions of dollars to spend, you must build your business or prove the traction to investors by dominating a specific niche market segment. In the latter case, you are essentially in a “segmente

Note that analytics, surveys, and other automated user-facing testing tools are complementary, to but not substitutes for “Getting Out of the Building.”

Your differentiator is not your compelling reason to buy, but the benefit the differentiator provides, likely is.