How to do customer development

Before building anything, it’s important to do customer development to make sure you’re solving a problem people actually care about. Customer development is the process of validating or invalidating assumptions about a customer segment, through customer discovery activities such as interviews, surveys, and market analysis.

Consider interviewing customers outside of your target market; their feedback can be just as valuable in helping you validate (or invalidate) key assumptions. By taking the time to do customer development up front, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort down the road. Focus on building things people actually want, that also works for your business.

Getting help from others is critical for customer development success. Ask for help from these mentors familiar with customer development best practices.