A playbook for Generating Business Ideas

What Exactly is Customer Development?
First developed by serial entrepreneur Steve Blank,
customer
development
is the
practice of gaining customer insights to generate, test, and optimize ideas for
products and services through interviews and structured experiments. Customer
development is used to help build products that customers want and avoid
spending time and money on products customers don't want. It can be used to
identify problems and new startup ideas, to test ideas, and to optimize ideas and
existing products.
In an age where technological advancement has made it easier than ever to build
a product, the question is no longer whether a product can be built, it's whether
or not it anyone actually wants it. Customer development helps us learn about
our potential customers. For example, what problems they have, how they
understand those problems, and what's really of value to them. You can make
some educated guesses based on experience, but actual customer feedback may
surprise you. I've been repeatedly amazed and surprised by how often I think a
product idea will be of such great demand to a customer because of it's obvious
value proposition, only to find out that customers don't really care about the
offering.
The job of an entrepreneur in a free-market economy is to relentlessly serve
customers. It's to provide more value to customers than competing or
comparable activities, and to do it in a way that generates a profit. Customer
development helps us do that effectively and efficiently.

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