Oct 23, 2009
Opportunity – is it real?
How do you identify opportunities?
According the Steve Blank, McClure, and the many of the mentors/VC/advisors in Silicon Valley, this notion of hitting the ground and asking your customers seems to be the route. Customer development is a huge step in identifying problems as well as opportunities. User-centric design and product seems to be a winning strategy.
But what questions do you ask, how do you phrase questions, how do you conduct usability test, and how do you objectively find opportunities.
If I asked, “would you like to see pictures of nearby bars and restaurants when you searched for a rental?”. 9/10 people would say yes. But if you phrased it, “would you rather see pictures of nearby bars or floor plan information”, the answers would be drastically different. I also like forcing negatives, eg “What are three things you dislike about this idea?”
When doing customer development, seems vital to be able to objectively solicit information from users.
On the other side, many entrepreneurs believe much can be determined by data and research of trends. How many people are searching key terms, how have other startups have launched the feature set successfully, etc.
Personally, I’m a fan of just asking a sampling of your customer base.
“It takes only five users to uncover 80 percent of high-level usability problems” Jakob Nielsen
