Lesson: Customer Development with Steve Blank

Step #6 Customer Types: Understanding who your customer is and what value you bring is product market fit

That's kind of wonderful, but we keep talking about the customer. Let me remind you what it looks like from their side, and we'll be talking about customers in more detail in the next lecture. Let me just give you a preview.

In customer segments, you're also looking for three things. One is you are still trying to understand from this side what are the gains, what are the pains, but also what are the jobs the customers want you to do? What are the functional or social jobs? What are the emotional jobs? What are the basic needs that you're going to be solving? Or problems.

The goal of all of this is not just to understand this but to understand it in enough detail that you can actually draw the persona or archetype of those customers and put them on the wall of your engineering department.

Now, they could stare at faces that you'll clip out and specs of how old they are, where they live, what job they're trying to get done, and what pains and gains your value proposition is trying to solve for them. Until you do that you're just going to be making products in the dark.

As we said, understanding these three components of value proposition work together with understanding the three components of customer segment. In value proposition, the goal of this is to find out that minimum viable product.

In customer segments the goal is to understand in detail the customer archetype or persona. Again, this equals product market fit.

I can't emphasize enough that the business model canvas is just a start. It's great to strategize and think about who customer segments are and value proposition and channel but remember, all you're doing is writing down hypothesis.

Your job is to turn those hypothesis into facts. There are no facts inside your building so your job is to get outside and test them personally in a physical channel by talking to hundreds of customers.

In a web and mobile channel by talking to thousands virtually, and some portion, physically. You need to watch peoples' pupils dilate when they actually see and like your product.