Customer development. Market research. Whatever you want to call it. Are you doing it? Are you forming hypotheses and testing them by interacting with your (potential) customers? If you’re not, you’re losing out on some huge insights.
Customer development can and should be started even before you start building a product. You should be getting out of the building and hitting the streets talking to your potential customers. Your goal? Finding out if there’s a problem worth solving. Not a problem you think is worth solving, but a problem your potential customers think is worth solving.
Why is this important? Because you don’t want to be building a product that doesn’t solve someone’s problem. You’re now stuck looking for a problem that fits your solution. It’s much harder this way or impossible if the problem doesn’t even exist.
At SnapEditor, we recognized that there were problems with existing rich text editors, but that was only our take on it. We went out and started talking to potential customers and listened to what they had to say about existing rich text editors.
From our research, we found the biggest problems were stability and clean HTML. This is what we ended up concentrating on, even at the expense of not having all the features other rich text editors currently have. We knew that those features could be added. However, stability and clean HTML needs to be built into the core of the product and could not simply be patched on. It is something that needs to be actively preserved.
While continuing to build and improve SnapEditor, we’ve received quite a number of feedback relating to how stable and clean our rich text editor is. This means our customers notice and it validates our previous research. Of course, we’re not done yet and there’s still lots more to come, but it is good to know we’re on the right track.
If you’re not doing customer development now, I encourage you to start. You may be surprised by what you find.
Have examples of how customer development has helped you? Leave comments below!