4.02.09 Teleclass Doing Your Best Marketing In The Worst Of Times
Customer Driven Design
1. Building what you can sell
and selling what you can build…
By: Reme A. Pullicar
StartupTV 04/20/2014
2. Fast Paced Market Driven Competitive Market Custom
Feature Rich Social Networking Customer Ratings
5 Stars Yelp Epinions Angie’s List
Customer Service Customer Complaints Gross Revenues
Answer: They all relate to how happy customers are with your product!
What do the following terms
all have in common?
3. Every company, new and old, starts down the road to profitability or failure
with the same essential start: a MinimallyViable Product.
An MVP is a product’s genesis and is often bereft of features. It includes just
what’s needed to get a saleable product to market. Most inventors and
business leaders think they have a good idea of what will sell. But do they?
According to AcuPoll, nearly 95%
of all new products fail (i).
WHAT? How could that be?
MinimallyViable Product (MVP)
Crappy products
nobody wants!
The Market
The products
you will build
next (v.2,3,4…)
4. Joan Schneider and Julie Hall of the Harvard Business Review (ii), postulate
that there are five primary reasons why products fail in the market.
1. The company cannot support fast growth (e.g. Mosquito Magnet).
2. The product falls short of claims and gets bashed in the market
(e.g. MicrosoftVista).
3. The new product exists in „product limbo“ – somewhere between
products people actually want (e.g. Coke C2).
4. The product defines a new product category requiring substantial
consumer education – but doesn‘t get it (e.g. Febreze Scentstories).
5. The product is revolutionary, but there‘s no market for it (e.g. Segway).
And I would add – that the product is too focused or that the company
simply fails miserably in the area of customer service (i.e. the other 90%).
Why Products Fail
5. Customer Driven Design is a customer-focused mindset that attempts to
place the customer at the center of design.
Design is not limited to just products.The whole company experience and
everything it does should be driven by a solid customer focus.
It begins and grows within the earliest steps of business creation and
addresses such questions as:
• How accessible will our company be (CEO, Sales, CS, Support, Design)?
• How will we research, develop, and test packaging, marketing, and return
on ad placement?
• And ultimately, how will we learn about and integrate what people really
want into our products?
What is Customer Driven Design?
6. Step one – ask questions, ask often, LISTEN
Step two – ask more questions, INTEGRATE
Step three – ask more questions, IMPROVE
Step four – rinse and repeat
Adopting Customer Driven Design
ASK
QUESTIONS
LISTEN INTEGRATE
BUILDIMPROVE
7. Step one – Ask Questions: LISTEN
If want a better coffee experience – tell them about it (iii)
8. In his article, 14 Customer Feedback Tools for Small Business (iv),
Sig Euland of
PracticalEcommerce
suggests that customer
feedback is Essential.
Step two – Ask Questions: INTEGRATE
9. MeCam – a $49.99 always on video camera
INC Magazine, How our Customers Helped us Create a Better Product,
By John Brandon (v)
Bootstrapped MVP with a low price – listened to customers and improved:
Button size and battery life; but he did not add an LCD… why?
Step three – Ask Questions: IMPROVE
