Customer Development
On my quest to find the next thing to keep myself entertained and busy, I have been focusing on SaaS offerings for SMBs. I feel that this area has not received enough attention in India and lots can be done. Something I need to validate. I am pretty confident that I will be able to pull out a decent product, scale it and take it to a level where it is meaningful to the end customer. The place where I have been struggling was how do I go about customer acquisition. Most of the answers seemed to point to Marketing channels, SEO / SEM etc etc, the problem of how to identify the customer, what steps need to be followed were still not clear. This is when I came across a post by Eric Ries on the book "Entrepreneurs guide to Customer Development". This book is based on Steve Blank's Four Steps to Epiphany. I highly recommend Steve's blog, an excellent resource for entrepreneurs, there are lot of things that I have learned from his posts. Listed below is one of his presentations on Customer Development: