Learning about customers

Working for a startup company you go through a lot of problems, potential solutions and more problems. I was reminded of my company in the article by Startup Lessons Learned entitled Validated learning about customers. Eric Ries, who writes the Startup Lessons Learned blog, describes two scenarios with two fictional companies.

My company is like the first company in his post: the metrics of success change constantly and our product definition fluctuates regularly. Our development team is always busy but those efforts don’t exactly lead to added value to the product. We are pretty good at selling the one-time product but we have to put a lot of effort into each sale and so the sales process isn’t scalable. Worse it’s frustrating that management doesn’t see this.

At the end of the article Eric lists some solutions to companies with this “stuck in the mud” situation and I think the third solution is something my company should try: build tools to help the sales team reduce the time on each sale and try building parts of our product that make the sales process faster or the investment afterwards less. (I added that last bit). How good is your product if it requires customers spend large amounts of time, energy and money in order to make it usable? Shouldn’t the company make the use of your product as frictionless and automated as possible so it’s easy for customers?

After reading this article I’m interested in reading his full book: The Lean Startup.