I co-founded Panamplify with Christopher St. John back in 2013. Chris and I spun the company out of our marketing agency Extra Sauce, and from day one we were determined to follow Steve Blank’s process called Customer Development outlined in his book The Four Steps to the Epiphany. A little over three years later, we have a funded company that has achieved “product market fit” and we are heading into the third phase of the process called “Customer Creation.” Following the Four Steps works. By “works” I mean it’s the best way to validate your idea. It does not make your idea a great one.
Be prepared for a painful process.
Customer Development is a painful and counterintuitive process. The traditional product-centered approach made famous by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and William Hewlett and David Packard (disappear for 18 months into a garage and emerge with a product to spring on the market) gives way to the exact opposite: Get out of the office with barely an idea and find out what the (potential) customer actually needs and is willing to pay for. Most entrepreneurs with an idea shudder at the idea of getting something half-baked in front of a customer. “My product’s not close to ready” is a common refrain.
Panamplify automates client report building for marketing agencies. In order to verify the need we were confident existed, we built a real client report for an agency and delivered it to them literally by hand. No system. No login. Nothing. And they paid for it. Then we built another a little less by hand. The bottom line is that if a customer really needs your product they won’t care about anything else and you will have learned a ton and saved a lot of money by simply focusing on…