Customer development is the idea that instead of building something and hoping people use it, you find a market (an abstract set of customers defined by common needs) and then build a product for them. It has been evangelized in recent years by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, and Marc Andreesen, among others.

You achieve product-market fit (the #1 goal of customer development) when your product matches the needs of your market. The markets’ needs are dictated by what the market is willing to pay for. Payment can be either money (flat up-front fee, or monthly fee) or continued attention. Continued attention can be monetized so it’s as good as money.

You have to make sure that your market is large enough that market size/# of people * payment is a big enough pay day for whatever your needs are.

So there are a few steps to guaranteed success.

1. Market Assessment

2. Product Building

3. Get product into hands of early customers

4. Do 40% of your users consider your product 1=Critical on a scale of 1 to 5 when surveyed? Continue building til profit. If not, return to step 1. Your market assessment will be facilitated with everything you’ve learned thus far.

The above 4 steps can occur in any order but you will eventually go through all of them at some point.

#1, Market Assessment, is the hard problem. How do you figure it out? There are a number of ways. The best way is to just build something, and see if your market likes it. The rule of thumb (evangelized by sean ellis [http://startup-marketing.com/]) is will 40% of your users be Very Disappointed (on a likert type scale from 1 to 5) if they could no longer use your product. If it fails the 40% smell test, then repeat this step until you get it.

Pick an industry that you like. Pick a website. Survey users of that website using http://www.survey.io. Use insights gleaned from that survey to conceive a forward-iterative solution. Use this wordpress theme http://ready2launch.jedenbod.cz/ to collect email addresses for your product. Notify your market about this solution using an advertisement targeted towards the pain points you learned about through survey.io [hint: use my site, http://www.CustomerFind.com]. Got enough interest? Proceed.

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