Another week has passed, and once again we are left with more questions than answers. However, these are good questions, questions we can learn from – even by just observing our customers when posed with the same questions.

This week we have gone through a series of extremely interesting “Mini MBA” sessions taught by leading industry experts. Each session was completely different, but all were with the same purpose – cramming new tools and ideas to cope with these new questions. Whether it was pricing, recruiting or sales, in a startup of 4 people, you need to have all of them. And as Guy likes to say it, titles are insignificant – all of us are CGSDOs – “Chief Getting Shit Done Officers”.

Amazing business opportunities have surfaced or have come back to life with potential partners this week. One of these opportunities is with a market leader in the field of e-commerce. To better prepare we applied the Customer Development framework.

Customer Development is a four-step framework to discover and validate that you have identified the market for your product, built the right product features that solve customers’ needs, tested the correct methods for acquiring and converting customers, and deployed the right resources to scale the business.

[Brant Cooper & Patrick Vlaskovits]

Say what?
Essentially, Customer development is a tool that allows you to validate quickly with your customers that you’re not going in the wrong direction and your business assumptions are correct.

A key idea emphasized in this method is the “Mom Test”.
They key principal is that any question you ask your customer (in the process of a customer interview) should be open for the “wrong answer” on his end without him knowing that he is hurting your feelings.

Going back to the analogy: If you ask your mom a question and she knows that you’ll be hurt provided her honest answer, she wouldn’t answer the truth.

Meaning, any question should be phrased in a manner that even if you ask your mom this question, she should be able to answer truthfully without knowing she is hurting your feelings.

“What do you think about our solution to your problem?” = BAD
“What do you think if one were to employ this kind of a solution to your problem?” = Better

Honest answers, however brutally painful they can be, are much more interesting for you and your business than having a sugar coated response and patting yourself on the back.

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This week we are going to have an important discussion with this market leader. To be honest, we are not yet sure on how it will go or how good our solution fits his needs. However, we do feel a bit more confident, employing this method to getting an initial validation to our assumptions.

Happy Passover and Easter!
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Dan

Co Founder & Head of Business Development at eRated
Dan is the Israeli curator of the collaborative consumption movement,A passionate entrepreneur and has been working in software development for the past 8 years.
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