Some Obvious but Awesome Tips for Customer Development Online

TechCrunch is out with a very interesting post by Nigel Eccles, co-founder and CEO of Hubdub Ltd, the company behind Hubdub, the news prediction game, and Fanduel, the daily draft fantasy sports game. The post, The Long Lost Formula for Start-up Success, centers around Eccles' experience developing his companies inside of the framework of Steve Blank's customer development driven product design methodology. While so much of what is recommended sounds obvious, the article is definitely worth a read and has convinced me to take The Four Steps to the Epiphany off of my wish list and actually start reading it.

There is something that turns sane men irrational when it comes to thinking about developing a business on the web. As if revenue, or more importantly cash flow cease to matter in the quest to build something people use. The framework provides a great reminder that the goal is always to make a product compelling enough that users would be willing to pay for it. Whether you charge or not is not necessarily the point, but creating something people are willing to buy should be. This forces you to think more critically about the real value and scope of the problem you are trying to solve.

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