1.
Learn Faster with Customer Development
KISSinsights Case Study
Hiten Shah
The Lean Startup SXSW • March 12th, 2011

2.
Lean Startups are Built to Learn

3.
Customer Development
• It’s all about learning and discovery
• Outlined by Steve Blank in Four Steps to the Epiphany
Customer STOP
Customer STOP
Customer STOP
Scale STOP
Discovery Validation Creation Company
Pivot

4.
Original Hypothesis for KISSinsights
“Our hypothesis is that product manager type people have a
problem doing fast/effective/frequent customer research.”

5.
What we wanted to learn...
• What are they doing now?
• What are other tools leaving on the table?
• Who is involved?
• How frequent / severe is the pain?
• What else are customers complaining about?

6.
How we learned
• ~20 phone interviews (15 - 20 minutes each)
• 3 in-person user tests with paper prototypes
• 2 landing pages
• Hacky MVP on KISSmetrics.com
• 8 “alpha testers”

7.
What we learned!
• People are not doing customer research.
• They want private feedback and targeting.
• It requires developer involvement.
• It is a constant pain.

8.
What we built.
• A freemium on-site customer feedback tool
• That involves an easy one-time install
• Which provides private customer feedback
• And easy to understand reporting.

9.
Customer Development Tips

10.
Get out of the building!

11.
Start with a Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is that product manager type
people have a problem doing effective customer research
Our hypothesis is that ________________________________
people have a problem doing _______________________

12.
Talk about their problems, not your solutions.

13.
Find the severe pain

14.
Test your riskiest assumptions first

15.
Thank You!
@hnshah
hshah@kissmetrics.com