
We carpooled every day to get to know our customers - williswee
https://www.techinasia.com/talk/carpooled-day-customers
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saycheese
Curious, has anyone ever seen a startup that does customer development as a
service?

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marcosdumay
Is customer development still worth anything if a third party does it?

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saycheese
Valid question, aware of it as a response to this question, but it doesn't
address the orginal question. If there's a existing notable service doing
customer developement as a service, the fact they exist might provide an
answer to your question.

Maybe one way to rephrase the question that might be more common might be:

Is it okay as a co-founder to let another cofounder handle customer
development if they're more experienced at doing it? Or as a non-technical
founder, is it okay to outsource development?

My experience is this is super common, and as such, if a solo founder is not
experienced doing customer development, it would make sense at the very least
get help doing customer development.

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marcosdumay
Personally, I'd be delighted if somebody could convince me the answer to my
question was "yes". But I'm staying skeptical.

Specialized cofounders is a much less dangerous situation than outsourced core
tasks. There are some events of companies failing or people getting really bad
deals because the cofounders didn't all have the complete picture on their
heads, but since they normally work in close contact and have the same
interests, this is rare. Completely outsorcing those tasks completely remove
both the proximity and interests alignment.

Yet, I think you are right in that some service that would watch what I'm
doing and tell me "now, you need to do X", "you should have done Y", or "don't
ever do Z again!" would be valuable. I'd call that "tutoring", not
"outsorcing", and I have no idea if somebody does it.

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saycheese
My experience is the number one strength a founder has their passion. It's
really not something that can easily be copied and given the vast amounts of
opportunities in the world, hiring someone that really knows how to map that
passion to a business model and attack the assumption has zero to do with
being an entrepreneur, it's just another skill. Core issue is if the founder
is not learning from the process and owning it.

Anyway, it's a topic that's interesting to me given how bad most startups are
at it.

