Listen To Your Customer. We're all ears!

As Forbes recently reported (http://onforb.es/RU7n6l), a lean-startup that begins with a great idea is off to a good start; but the sooner you shift your focus to the customer, the better.

In early October, the Entrepreneurs Challenge was happening at the Stern School of Business.  70 teams were on the receiving end of priceless advice from experienced coaches.  This year, the program was focused on the customer. The "customer is king" - to be successful you have to find ways to incorporate their feedback, ideas and critique into your product development. 

“Concentrating on the costumers and the market is probably the only way to be successful,” said Gilbert Sabater, who has been a mentor for ten years.

“I want to see them examine their ideas in depth,” said Lloyd Newman, who has extensive experience in sales and marketing. “I want them to get the facts and come back with hard data.”

That kind of discovery can be hard to manifest. Bad research won’t yield good data. Most customers can’t express exactly what they want, and won’t tell you exactly how they’ll respond to hypothetical situations. Placing an unyielding focus on customer experience is the only way to overcome common obstacles faced by lean start-ups. At some point, most start-ups experience frustration over stalled deals and customers that won’t make a decision.

It’s important to be in a position to examine the effectiveness of your product, which is a different process than examining the effectiveness of your marketing. Your experiments should be conducted with customer feedback in mind, and the results should be measureable. The most reliable way to find out what your customers are thinking is to simply ask them. You need to gather first-hand knowledge of your product through their eyes.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What value am I creating?
• How can I best deliver that value to my target customer?

Conscious experimentation and planning causes you to pay attention to the noise that your potential customers are making, and start treating it like the data it is. You need to be able to diagnose the problems in your sales process. Those little complaints that lead to hard truths are a great place to start. When your business processes sync up with your customers’ needs, your start-up will rise to a new level of success.  

We are working on improving the UX  of our platform. We are trying to build a relevant, attractive and effective product and would love to hear your thoughts! Join us in an UX feedback session to help shape for our product development. Please refer to our facebook event for further information!

-bmt