I led a very interactive session on customer development and pricing for startups on Jan-19-2016 with the Montreal Lean Startup Circle. I have included the slides and their text but they comprise only about 1/6 of the session, the bulk of which was having different entrepreneurs in the audience present their challenges with customer development and pricing and helping them to walk around the situation.
Customer Development & Pricing For B2B Startups
Lean Startup Circle Montreal January 19 2016 description:
- Having trouble finding the right customer segment?
- Not getting the feedback you need to validate your assumptions?
- Having trouble figuring out how to ensure your product features answer your target market needs?
Sean Murphy is a lean startup expert from Silicon Valley who was at the root of the Lean Startup movement developed by Eric Ries. He has coached multiple Silicon Valley startups and helped them implement Lean Startup. He has worked with Cisco Systems, 3Com, AMD, and VLSI Technology among others. He is now CEO of SKMurphy, Inc. He will give you practical advice and show you how to go about doing your customer development.
Slides From Customer Development & Pricing For B2B Startups
Slideshare: Slides for A deep-dive on Customer Development and Pricing for B2B startups
A Deep-Dive on Customer Development and Pricing for B2B startups
Sean Murphy SKMurphy Tue-Jan-19-2016 For Montreal LSC
Does Your Prospect Have a Problem?
- What are the symptoms of the problem?
- What are they currently doing to address it?
- What alternatives were considered?
- What other alternatives are available to them?
- Are they still looking for a solution?
- Why?
How Bad is the Problem?
- What parameters drive problem severity?
- What are three to six questions
- With yes, no, or number answer
- That allow you to estimate impact
- Is it improving, stable, or deteriorating?
- What trends are making it worse?
Business Value Calculation
- Transition from confirming a problem is a critical business issue
- Symptoms and diagnosis
- To assessing the impact of your solution
- Prescription and prognosis
- Severity before vs. Severity after
What Does It Do? (For The Customer)
- What decisions are improved by your output?
- What can they do three minutes after they have used your product
- Business Impact
- Increase
- Revenue
- Capacity
- Flexibility/Agility
- Quality (match spec)
- Reduce
- Cost (fixed or variable)
- Risk
- Cycle time
- Errors
Calculating Value
- Impact = Severity Before – Severity After
- How much improvement do you offer?
- How often does this problem occur?
- Delta = Impact x Frequency
Around the Room
- Customer + Problem + Value
- Who is the buyer?
- What are they responsible for?
- How are they measured?
- What is the critical business issue: pain, problem, or need the buyer has?
- Value of your solution
- Delta from current situation
- Three to six questions / parameters