Customer Discovery

In 2007, Jason Cohen sold SmartBear Software, a company he had founded to create peer code review tool Code Collaborator. When the entrepreneurial bug hit again, Jason had a few ideas he wanted to explore. One of these ideas was to create a spin-off of

Phil Fernandez, Jon Miller and David Morandi started Marketo — now part of Adobe — in 2006. Before writing a single line of code, the partners spent the first year interviewing senior marketers about their needs and pain points. They started the company cold calling

If the problem is real, people are dealing with it somehow. Maybe they’re doing something manually, because they don’t have a better way. The current solution, whatever it is, will be your biggest competitor at first, because it’s the path of least resistance for people.

There are good and bad ways to do B2B customer development interviews and, unfortunately, to the untrained eye, they look very similar. Here are 16 key interview pointers to help you conduct valid interviews and improve your customer interview techniques: Key Tips for B2B Customer

“You have to go where the customer is.” – Michael Wolfe, Vontu Co-Founder and Startup Advisor A “watering hole” is where your prospects gather for pleasure or for work. It can be a conference, a tradeshow, a seminar, a restaurant, a bar, an hotel, or

With startups, the prospects get to meet with the CEO or the head of products, not just the salespeople, like Oracle or Cisco. The buyers are just people — they want to have fun at work. They’re trying to get smarter, they’re trying to have fun. –

“We cannot have a validated value proposition without a validated customer segment.” – Tristan Kromer, Innovation Consultant The ideal value proposition is one sentence long — the perfect length for word of mouth. It should never use the words ‘technology,’ ‘software’ or ‘platform’ because these