The Customer Development Process

You need to print out and make a giant version of the business model canvas and post it to the wall. You need to construct hypothesis about your business based on each segment (like we mentioned in the task above) and then get out of the building and test them.

The customer development process is actually a 4 step process with two different phases:

  • Customer Discovery: This is the first step of the search phase. This is where you construct your hypotheses and get out of the building and you start testing your assumption about wether other people have the same problem.
  • Customer Validation: You'll see if your proposed solution actually matches what you think the customer problem was. This is sometimes called product/market fit... This is the search for the business model (the pivot happens between these steps until you find a repeatable and scalable business model).
  • Customer Creation: This is the first step in the execution phase of customer development. It's about creating end-user demand and scale.
  • Company Building: You then need to transition from customer development to a functional organization that's oriented to constant and functional execution