Comments on: How we totally ignored our customers

By: Learning about our customers – Martin Kleppmann at Yes/No/Cancel

Learning about our customers – Martin Kleppmann at Yes/No/Cancel — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:54:45 +0000

[...] in December I wrote about my realisation that we had not been spending enough time learning about our customers at Go Test It. Since then, I [...]

By: Martin Kleppmann

Martin Kleppmann — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:29:32 +0000

Thanks Jon, a valuable comment. Of course things always look different with the benefit of hindsight, and you never know what could/would have happened differently. Indeed, trying to do it by the book would have slowed me down a lot. However, reading this book I did get the impression that all the questions it encourages you to ask are very valid and valuable ones, and if you go about it with some focus, you can probably get some pretty good insights into customers’ lives in less than a month of work. And the book gives you some pretty clear ideas about what to ask, so you don’t have to invent that from scratch.

So, given another chance, I would probably do a few things differently. But then I do obsess about continuously learning and developing personally, which is a never-ending process — we’ll never get to the point of knowing the true ‘right way’, we can only hope to make fewer silly mistakes. :)

By: Jonathan Markwell

Jonathan Markwell — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:19:48 +0000

Thank you again for some great insight Martin. The Four Steps to the Epiphany is now on my reading list.

Are you really sure that you should have done things differently?

It strikes me that you’ve had a very good outcome given the odds were against you as they are with all startups. Even if you did have a cofounder, taking the time to do things ‘the right way’ or ‘by the book’ may still have held you back from delivering what you have.

The distractions of following procedures, well documented approaches and taking on too much expert advice are some of the things that hold organisations back from innovating. I think successful startups are built by founders scratching their own itch under the direction of their own gut feel. Obviously startup founders need luck on their side, ensuring that enough other people have the same itch.

The alternative to the gut feel approach is potentially much worse than depending on luck. If founders invest too much time at an early stage taking on other people’s advice and following procedures they might find themselves with a project they are no longer personally passionate about. Needless to say, without that passion the chances of a startup delivering something brilliant with a small amount of time and resources are massively diminished.