B2C Customer Development, part 1 of 3: Prototyping
Customer development is one of the buzzwords you cannot avoid if you are involved with startups today. In short, it means developing your product in cooperation with your customers, making sure you understand their needs and develop a product that meets them. This mini-series of blog posts assumes that you are familiar with the basics of customer development (if you want to catch up, read first this blog post by Eric Ries, then if you want dive into Steve Blank’s 76-slide deck).
In B2B startups, this approach is usually very smart. If you are genuinely interested in making someone’s life and job easier and not selling them anything (until it is so good they ask you to sell it to them), they will generally help you and offer you valuable insights, or at least point you in the right direction if they are too busy.
But what about startups that are clearly B2C? Where do you find the customers to do customer development with, how should you test and what are the right moments for testing? With a consumer product user experience and context of use is key, so if your prototype has some conceptual gaps, you may not get realistic reactions and feedback. In the case of B2C, rather than prototype in code, it might be better to prototype in (interactive) PDF, Flash or just a video demo. That way you can convey the imagined actual experience, even if not the actual functionality. When testing this with your potential users, make sure to note what is of interest to them, what do they react to, and what do they not understand. Concentrate on the things that make a difference. As far as tools go, you can use just Keynote or PowerPoint to create interactive PDFs, and there are ready template sets (such as Keynotopia) that make prototyping very quick. The added benefit with interactive PDFs is that if you are prototyping a mobile app, a clickable PDF prototype can be opened on the mobile device, and can provide a very similar experience to the finished app.
Of course, if you are faster with prototyping in code and get a nicer-looking end result, by all means go for code. Here is a great collection of resources for getting up and running.
A light-weight, non-functional but visual prototype can also easily reach your user for testing them in the right context. Sitting down with someone and sharing a laptop to show a new product from a local dev environment can feel really useful and give you the impression that you are doing proper customer development, but it may also throw the user into a different operating mode than they would be in when they would use your actual product. First, you are there, which can influence their behaviour: they can try to be a good test subject for example, which is something you do not want. Sending an interactive PDF over IM to someone and then calling them up to ask for their reactions (or waiting over Skype) can reach them in the right context, in the right mindset, without distractions (or rather, the right distractions for the actual context of use).
Try to get as close to the context and timing of your actual envisioned product use as you can. If you are developing a Facebook app, ping them on Facebook’s IM. If it is a Twitter app, DM or @mention them. If you have a game, ask them what time of day they normally play and get in touch then. While this may seem like trivial details at first, consider how differently you work throughout the day. Do you respond to emails differently in the morning than in the afternoon? What kind of YouTube content would you watch during working hours, and what outside of them? Do not assume that the user you tested will behave that way across contexts. Light-weight prototyping helps in tackling this issue.
The next parts are about finding and recruiting users for B2C customer development, and about the role beta or teaser landing pages play in B2C customer development.
Mikko Järvenpää, Marketing Geek, HackFwd
