
Ask HN: Product/Market Fit (Customer Dev) as a Service? - jwillgoesfast
&quot;What if everything you think you know about taking products to market is wrong? What would you 
do differently if you realized that only 1 out of 10 new product introductions result in a profitable 
business? Would you continue to operate the same way, week after week, year after year?&quot;<p>- Steve Blank, Four Steps to Epiphany<p>Like most startups, I have struggled through the pains of product market fit, multiple pivots and struggling to find customers.<p>What if there was a way to quickly and accurately determine not only if your idea is on the right track but to iterate through product&#x2F;market fit and even pivots before you endure the sweat and heartbreak of building a few MVP&#x27;s?<p>Obviously there are lots of challenges to creating such a service, but I think it is a discussion worth having. In the spirit of CD, let&#x27;s start the ball rolling with some questions:<p>1. Does your resume include a failed startup? 
2. With hindsight being 20&#x2F;20, should you have done more Customer Development? 
3. Would you now consider a service to improve and expedite that process?
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ef4
Your proposal sounds like a wish-fulfillment fantasy for founders who want to
skip the hard part.

I'm skeptical that you could generalize the process. But even if you could, it
wouldn't make any sense to offer it as a service to startup founders, because
you would then control the biggest value creation step. They would be nothing
but idea sources, and ideas are worth very little. Instead you would just use
your fantastic process to churn out your own products, possibly paying small
royalties to people who come to you with good introductions & ideas.

Or let me put it another way: every angel fund, startup accelerator, and VC
would love to have a magic way to "quickly and accurately determine if an idea
is on the right track". That's what they spend all their time thinking about.
Do you really think they're missing something obvious?

~~~
guybrushT
That is certainly one interpretation of the OPs question. And you are right:
there is no silver bullet/magic formula/secret recipe. There are some nuances
in the way the original question is framed. So the framing that 'a way to
quickly and accurately determine if your idea is on the right track' is not
good - ideas aren't good or bad, they are never on the right or wrong track -
they are what they are, just ideas. Its the execution of an idea that paves
the way and propels the idea in a specific direction. So, while there isn't
(and may never be) a great tool/process/discipline to evaluate ideas - there
are tools/processes/disciplines available to evaluate execution.

So, I read the question slightly differently - and I would say there is
definitely something here. I can imagine a consulting service (problem-solving
and execution discipline for startups - kinda like what mckinsey does for the
fortune 500 :)) that could bring structured problem solving, fact-based de-
biasing (countering delusions of optimism), focussed execution, research,
'talking to users' (the famous YC mantra) and (I don't have good name for it)
lets call it "learning from experience and experiments of others" etc may be
possible as a service.

Its the help a startup needs between "office hours" and execution. I do think
that there is a piece missing here, that can be developed.

~~~
jwillgoesfast
> "Its the help a startup needs between "office hours" and execution. I do
> think that there is a piece missing here, that can be developed."

Pretty much agree with everything you said, this is a good unpacking of what I
was trying to briefly convey in the OP.

For example, if one of the founders is strong in Biz Dev, then they probably
don't _need_ this (though some level of assistance would still be helpful),
but if this is not the case, then getting guidance and potentially full-
service assistance with an all-in effort in gaining customer feedback in a
valid way that could be just the frequency shift that determined success or
failure in an otherwise solid product/idea.

Basically you would be taking the product from something potential customers
respond with "maybe" into something they say "Heck yes, take my money!"

------
gbelote
To give you an embarrassing personal anecdote: In my first startup I wanted to
do customer development. The lean startup was a fresh and growingly popular
idea, and we devoted more time and energy talking to potential customers than
turning our proof-of-concept prototype into an MVP. It looked smart on paper.
Unfortunately that didn't go so well and my conclusion was that we were doing
customer development wrong. So we tried to do customer development "better"
instead of pivot.

I was so mentally set in my idea that I consistently gravitated to the next-
simplest explanation when I encountered sad evidence. And even though I
believed I was being smart and understood customer development, I was
following a checklist of things I thought I was supposed to do and was
confused when we stagnated. I pretty much was asking to learn my lesson the
hard way. :)

It seems very plausible that new products and services can be built to help
founders be more effective at customer development. However one major obstacle
if you outsource customer development too much will be dodging bullets as the
messenger.

If I had used a CD service I'd probably assume the person was doing it wrong.
They don't get my product, they are bad at sales, they aren't finding the
right customers, etc. And then I'd wonder why I was throwing away my money
(out of my personal pocket) for a service that wasn't "working". Unless you're
a customer development superhero there might even be a little truth in all
those things – it's going to take you a while to orient to the company's
vision and market.

Another issue is that you'll probably see adverse selection from your clients.
Folks who are good at customer development or stumble into promising early
traction probably aren't going to hire a consultant for that stuff. So you're
going to get people who either have an aversion to talking to customers and/or
have hit a wall finding customers. And it's quite possible that the stuff
you'll try is very similar to the stuff they tried and failed. So most of your
clients might be biased towards failed startups, which may create a lot of
churn and make it harder to gain inbound leads.

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zefi
There is an absurdly high need for this service, but my god this is a hard
task. I think the way to do this is spend 6 months working exclusively with
about 10 early stage startups (pre PMF) which are relatively similar in the
type of market they're going after. You then help them however you think you
can in getting to PMF. Keeping the types of markets similar lets you get to
actionable learnings quicker; an important learning for a gaming startup isn't
going to be as useful for one built on enterprise sales. The help you provide
could be customer interviews/sales/lead generation/landing page
testing/anything. But the goal is to try and work out which of the tactics
lead to the most progress for each startup, then create a playbook that can be
applied to the next batch of 10 startups you help. Then as that playbook
becomes more refined you slowly start to productise some of these services to
speed up the process and add more startups to each batch. Then a few years
down the line you have a low touch software product that will take founders
through each of the steps you have worked out are most useful for startups
operating in their type of market. This is a slow process for sure, but I
think to be successful at this you have to acknowledge how broad the problem
is and how little you know how to solve it right now.

------
MCRed
1\. YES!

2\. Well this seems like one of those questions you could always say yes to.
"Do you think you should have saved more money in your 20s?" "Do you think you
should have worked out more over the past 5 years?" Who isn't going to say
yes?

That being said, the failure of our business came about because the business
model of the market we were serving shifted, as a result of a new piece of
technology. Our customers didn't anticipate this shift (customers don't know
what they want until they see it in some cases) and we, when the other
business model came about, didn't recognize its significance. So, alas, I
don't think customer development would have helped because nobody had invented
the thing that killed us at the time we would have been doing customer
development.

3\. YES! I would love to buy a customer development as a service type service.
Part of the problem for me is that customer development is sometimes very
hard, it's not always easy to identify the customers for a particular idea.

------
vishalchandra
Wow ! I think it is great to see the comments on this thread. Thanks
jwillgoesfast for asking this question.

I have actually been working on building a Product/Market Fit (Customer Dev)
as Service product for the last 12 months and before that I had been advising
(mostly on shaping up ideas to get the product definition right) / helping out
two new startup teams every month, for about 7 years now. This happened
primarily because I enjoy meeting startups and because I was part of a large
alumni network which would reach out.

The key assumption for the P/M-F service is whether something like this can be
scalable and work in a self-serve mode (i.e. where I am not in the room)

So I have kept iterating on the framework, took inputs from the founders I had
advised in the past. My key question to them was "How did I help you even
though I was not really a expert in the marketing you were targeting?"

I also conducted lean canvas workshops with startups in US and India (and
across sectors including one 7-year old pharma company trying to launch a
product) till I could start standardizing (so that it could then be coded into
software) the P/M-F process and build a self-serve tool. The tool has now
taken the shape of an "intelligent" software which asks startup founders
questions and assigns them tasks to do.

There is a lot of complexity in the tool. And it needs to be much more
intelligent as well. We have explored using machine learning at the backend,
but so far the intelligence is based more on a decision tree structure, rather
than any machine learning.

Currently in private alpha, testing with some startups and an accelerator, and
will release this soon for others, hopefully by end of this month.

[http://www.uberstarter.com](http://www.uberstarter.com)

~~~
jwillgoesfast
Very cool, Looking forward to seeing how uberStarter grows. I think you have a
good model to target incubators and accelerators.

------
apabon21
Attended the Chicago Lean Startup Challenge this summer. They push teams to do
experiments to determine if their guess/business idea is solving a real need
of a customer segment. This 8 week program has saved a lot of companies from
building the wrong product and addressing the wrong problem. Watch some of the
videos on BuiltinChicago.org to hear how the interview process lead to a major
pivot and the start of a company. Summary: Don't built it unless you have done
considerable customer interviews and determined A. you are addressing a
morphine problem not an aspirin problem and B. The customer base will pay for
your solution. Then you build and A/B test. :)

~~~
jwillgoesfast
This. I think the biggest problem startups make is finding a problem and
building a solution, but not realizing there is a difference in problem size,
value and pain per your medicine analogy.

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nostrademons
If you could do this quickly, reliably, and repeatedly - in other words, if
there's actually a business in this - then you are far better off starting a
conglomerate to own these businesses outright than to sell the service to
founders.

------
benologist
I think if a startup has spent a bunch of time building a product without
considering who should use it and how they should reach those people then
they're pretty fundamentally isolated from the industry they wish to service.

Steve Blank's not saying the other 90% were good ideas.

~~~
jwillgoesfast
Good point, there are a lot of bad ideas out there. But, even the best
ideas/products are not what they started out as, they involved pivots and
market changes. Was this due to luck, or were the founders fundamentally
committed to creating a business that adds value vs. simply in love with their
"great idea"?

~~~
benologist
I like to think successful founders "got there" pivoting or otherwise, by
being good at bringing a product to market and building a company around it.

Startups that need to as ef4 put it "outsource the hard stuff" are pretty much
proven bad at bringing a product to market, I don't think it's likely their
problems will be as simple as customer development vs. being underprepared,
inexperienced or just plain unsuitable to found companies.

