Comments on: How to Develop With Instead of For Your Customers

By: Ray James

Ray James — Sun, 13 Oct 2013 00:24:00 +0000

I think a big mistake many people make when considering a new idea is to cherry pick the customers they intend to ask for an opinion. Customers who are also friends and family are on the one hand the easiest to access and on the other the absolute worst for this exercise. They will invariably be supportive and tell you it’s your best idea yet. They’re not being untruthful it’s just very difficult for them to react any other way. So my advice is randomly select a batch of customers and ask away. Quite often the responses you get will lead you to the real next big thing for your business.

By: MaeganA

MaeganA — Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:51:00 +0000

Great stuff. Again,Make sure that your business has an established procedure for dealing with customer and that it is known to all your employees and it should be involve courteously and sympathetically.

By: Blake Robison

Blake Robison — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 22:03:00 +0000

In reply to ducttape. Understood. Perhaps a private collaboration solution where the process can be controlled to specific subjects would function more efficiently.

By: ducttape

ducttape — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:50:00 +0000

In reply to Blake Robison. Yes I have, but you would need to tightly control the process and those aren't very good for that - I like to start with known subjects who already understand your value proposition.

By: ducttape

ducttape — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 20:49:00 +0000

In reply to Gregg Senechal. Thanks Gregg - I agree it's a really powerful tool in the hands of a small business that can actually act on the information immediately

By: Gregg Senechal

Gregg Senechal — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 14:53:00 +0000

Great article! This can and should be applied to all business sizes.

By: Blake Robison

Blake Robison — Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:45:00 +0000

This is a great post John, I really like the idea of “Launching and Learning” in terms of using customer data to recreate a product to match the customers needs. It will be interesting to see what Nielsen does with their data. Have you ever considered Q&A platforms as a resource for collaboration or post launch customer interest/response data?

By: ducttape

ducttape — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 10:40:00 +0000

In reply to Stephen Lahey.

Thanks Stephen – so the next question is what are you going to do with the truth? 🙂

By: ducttape

ducttape — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 10:39:00 +0000

In reply to David Eberhart. Thanks Dave - would love to hear more

By: David Eberhart

David Eberhart — Tue, 24 Sep 2013 12:09:00 +0000

Our little operation is going through this right now in a big way. We call it “listening for pain points” and it led to us launching two businesses in less than three months. Those “pain points” are everywhere–especially in these days where companies are trying to run as lean as possible.