

Killing Your Startup By Listening to Customers - pier0
http://steveblank.com/2012/02/27/killing-your-startup-by-listening-to-customers/

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edgesrazor
One thing I've learned over the years is that you can't take it as gospel when
a customer says "I want X". When following a customer request to the letter,
most times you'll end up regretting the decision.

For us, the better way to handle when the customer asks for X, is to sit down
and create a persona and ask ourselves why they are asking for it, and who
else would want it.

I find we get a much better result when building requirements based off the
customer's pain rather than just giving them what they want. It helps maintain
usability by avoiding confusion over additional features and functions.

Then again, in a startup environment this is a tricky balancing act. You can't
forsake sales for a drawn out product management/development process, but you
also can't just add every customer feature request either.

~~~
ljf
Totally agree - I always try to focus on requirements, not features. It is
really hard for some people to speak in requirements, and the only way you can
get them out often is with frank discussions. Second guessing can work if you
know your customer really well, but asking people to talk with you works
amazingly IF you can help translate for them.

A while back I was rebuilding a larger kids site and in a meeting I was told
the site needed a 'big red button on the homepage, that makes a funny noise
when you press it' - everyone in the room agreed it was a great idea, and the
editorial team tried to push it onto my requirements list. I explained that it
was a feature not a requirement (to which they stated that 'well I require it
to be on the homepage, so it's a requirement') but I explained what I meant
and after a bit of talking we came up with a whole requirement set that we
were then able to set off and build to.

The original 'feature' became: As a user I want to be excited As a user I want
to be surprised As a user I want to feel I need to see what happens next As a
user I want to never know what might happen As a user I want to have some
thing 'physical' to play with As a user I want to feel like I've done
something to affect the site (and many many more)

We ended up with a fun widget on the home screen, and could well have even
made a big red button, if that was what would have best met the requirements
(it didn't btw). It ended up user testing really well, kids now love it and it
enhances 'accidental' journeys across the site (triggering it now fires you
off to a randomly selected page from a list of the 20 coolest pages).

But any time you can successfully translate 'features' into 'requirements' you
are on to a winner.

(Widget is here [lower right corner of the screen], and kids still love it!:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/> )

~~~
mtgentry
Kudos for having the stomach to listen to them and not simply cave in and
build that dumb red button. This is why I loathe client work.

~~~
ljf
Thanks, it was one of many internal battles, and I think we won those that
mattered. Working somewhere like the BBC is great, but as you are part of such
a huge machine you have to know when to fold, or you will never get anything
done!

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kyt
Did he actually look at the startup? It's also possible that it was just _bad_
\-- lacking in usability, useless features that cluttered up the UI, poor
aesthetics, etc.

Customer feedback only gets you so far. Often times people don't know what
they want or what the core problem they're having is.

~~~
vibrunazo
I thought the same, the entrepreneur told him that both free and passing users
weren't coming back. Doesn't that sound like a problem with both customer
segments? How does the advice of listening to only one of them helps him any
way, if he's not delivering what neither of them wants?

It seems that the proper advice would be to read through feedback and
understand what they really want then make sure you have that. Instead of
advising to ignore free customers.

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omonra
Is it just me or is this kind of an obvious (first) thing one should ask
themselves when starting a business - "How will you make money?"

~~~
AndrewDucker
Depends on the business. I'm willing to bet that neither Google nor Facebook
had a concrete idea of how they were going to make money when they started up.

And lots of sites seem to work on the principle that "First we get _all_ the
users. Then something mysterious happens. Then we're all rolling around in
cash."

~~~
mvkel
Google and Facebook are often cited in this regard because they are
_exceptions to the rule_. It's bad practice use them as the example.

~~~
vibrunazo
Just out of curiosity, can anyone give an example of a company had massive
scale (10m mau), but then ultimately failed because couldn't convert them into
payers? There are probably some, but I can't recall any. So I'd love to study
them.

~~~
cube13
I guess we should define failure here. Is it basically bankruptcy, where the
startup couldn't survive(or could barely survive) even after several rounds of
funding? Or are we talking about situations where the startup is bought out,
but just continues to lose money for the new parent company?

Digg comes pretty close to the first definition. They had around that number
of monthly uniques, and have pretty much lots most of the visitors(and
therefore ad revenue) in the last few years. They hemorrhaged money and
weren't able to find a buyer.

It hasn't completely failed, especially after the reorg they did a couple of
years ago, but it's definitely a shadow of it's former self.

As for the second, I guess Youtube around 2009 might count, considering that
they were still losing money for Google at that point(Credit Suisse's analysis
said that they were losing around $475 million, and RampRate's analysis said
$174 million). However, this is pretty much only a business failure, not
mindshare, and Google was still willing to drop money into them to get them to
profitability.

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dave_sullivan
Building _everything_ a customer asks for and following the "customer is
always right" mantra doesn't seem like a good idea.

As Steve points out in his article, customer development is about better
understanding your customer, their needs, and how to sell effectively to them.
It's not about giving away software consulting services for free-- it costs a
user nothing to ask for a feature/solution, but it costs you quite a bit to
build it for them and even more if they're the only user that wants this
particular feature or if they're unwilling to pay for it.

Tough to know where the balance is sometimes though.

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n9com
We literally get 100's of customer suggestions a week - what you have to
decide is which of these are popular and worthwhile additions to the product
and which are the niche, not worth the time features.

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sachingulaya
Don't ask your customers what to build. That's lazy.

"Listening" is the wrong word to use when it comes to feedback. You need to
engage customers about their pain points. Your customers understand their
problems but not the solution.

It's worth repeating--don't ask them for the solution. Ask them for the
problem.

------
deadman1204
look at how much money I spent on my back yard?

~~~
wam
It's not exactly the _intended_ topic of the post, but I had the same
reaction. The author seems to want to evoke a sense of calm or slowing down,
but the transition between the scene and the diagram-laden advice is really
pretty jarring. The weak transition reminds me of the E-Myth, a book which
grafted a gratuitous, saccharine narrative onto its small and fairly obvious
thesis.

Whatever the calming potato pond is supposed to do here, the subsequent jargon
storm undoes it. If "The Startup Owner's Manual" reads like this article (a
weird mix of narrative and startup-ese with italics strewn about like a
Christopher Walken monologue), I'd be hesitant to spend 40 bucks on it.

~~~
Periodic
Perhaps Blank is just testing a new model for his blog. He created an MVP and
is now testing it with us users to see what the reaction is.

I wouldn't be surprised if he just wants to play with his style a little bit,
particularly if he has just spent the last year writing a very technical book.

I'll wait for a pattern to emerge and in the mean time I will agree that the
style was very unrefined.

~~~
wam
Good point, there's nothing wrong with playing with style on a blog. Few
better places to test, practice, and refine.

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iconfinder
Customers tend to ask for features that makes the product incrementally better
and often stuff that is visible e.g. "A button that does X". They don't ask
for "better usability" or "performance improvements" unless it is very bad.
Also, I have never heard any users asking for a feature to be removed (even
though it might make the product better).

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chawco
Build what your customers want (and will pay for), not what they say they
want. These can be the same thing, but often are not.

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dsuriano
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."
-Henry Ford

~~~
bigiain
And, showing that the more things change, the more they stay the same, half a
century later:

"It’s not the consumers’ job to figure out what they want." Steve Jobs

