subtitles & new steps

Good morning Predictable Revenue community,

I’m working on subtitles and design this week. Well, technically the design is blocked by my lack of commitment on a subtitle so I need your help again. But first, a little context with where I am with the book development.

The title is settled, The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers. My goal is to connect the worlds of Customer Development and Sales, showing founders how to progress from one to the next without missing any steps. The content will cover finding product market fit, stepping into the founder sales role, and building your first sales team.

Here’s what I have so far…

If you have a better idea reply back at me! If I use it, I’ll send you a free copy of the book when it’s out.

Looking for a little more?

The book started out as Predictable Revenue 2 because that was the book that I felt I was supposed to write. My cofounder Aaron wrote the first one and so writing a follow up seemed like the right thing to do. But when I started writing about cold emails, cold calling, etc… I was bored, super bored. A piece of advice I received was to “follow the words”, meaning that any time words started to come easily, that’s the subject I should focus on today.

The days when the words came the easiest were the ones where I focused on customer development. When I first started learning about the subject, I couldn’t help but noticing the parallels to sales. A great customer development interview is effectively the first half of a great sales call. It wasn’t until fairly recently, and having a few of you point it out to me, that I realized the goal of the book was to connect the worlds of sales and customer development. It really sunk in when I got tactical and wrote about the four customer development interviews.

I’ve been running customer development interviews myself lately and realized that there was a gap in my four meetings. I initially had written them up as Exploratory Customer Development (looking for a gap), Focused Customer Development (confirming the gap exists), Feedback Demo (making sure you’re building the right thing), and Sales (asking for money). I had included a note in the feedback demo section that I usually do two rounds of these, one with a prototype before I (we) build anything and one with the MVP once it’s built.

What struck me as I went through this process was that while these two interviews were similar, it didn’t make sense to group them together because their timelines were so spread out. They could be weeks to months apart. My goal with the framework was to show founders how to slowly walk people from customer development into a sales conversation. Having the feedback demo as two steps felt like I was wasn’t making progress so I decided to break it up. Another consideration was testing and iteration, it’s obviously important but I didn’t want to rewrite The Lean Startup. That said, here are the new customer development stages:

• Exploratory Customer Development: find a big unmet need

• Focused Customer Development: validate the pain is shared by a wide audience

• Paper Feedback: confirm my proposed approach will be 10x better

• MVP Feedback: confirm that what we built delivers on the promised 10x

Splitting Feedback Demo into Paper and MVP helps me show that you’ll need to test the idea with low fidelity prototypes before you build anything. This better communicates the process that I use, and have used, when getting something new off the ground.

One last thing I’m stuck on is what to call it. I’ve called the time period The Middle but I wasn’t sure if I should make a name for these steps or just leave them as steps in the middle. One idea was calling it the customer development ladder. What do you think? Reply back with Middle, Ladder, or Other (and feel free to make other suggestions).

Collin 

PS - I’ve started picking up a few founder coaching clients again and have one or two spots open in my calendar, hit me back if you’re interested in learning more.