A playbook for Generating Business Ideas

b. Customer Development, Customer Development, and MORE
Customer Development
I asked people what challenges they were facing and what products and services
they wanted. The specifics of how I did that are a little more complicated, but
that’s the gist of it.
I did A LOT of customer development interviews. I interviewed people over the
phone, over Skype, over Gchat, over text, and of course…in person. I was a
customer development machine. My life was like a three month long Lean
Startup Machine seminar.

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2. Optimize for Efficiency
Time and money are an entrepreneur’s most valuable resources. I didn’t want to
waste either.
a. Do Things That Don’t Scale
I sacrificed scalability for quality and for speed to validation much of the time.
Again, I might not ever scale these businesses.The big advantage of not trying to
scale is that you can “
do
things
that
don’t
scale
.” You can provide better service
to each customer, you can use non-scalable customer acquisition tactics, etc.