The videos listed below will teach you key tools to get away from the workshop to learn about needs from your future customers face-to-face. Building on fundamentals in the book Talking to Humans (official free PDF version), which teaches critical skills to identify and interview your customer base. Following this advice may make you more successful than the researchers below.
Description of the process from customer discovery and validation (searching for a market) to execution (customer creation and customer creation). Primary (face-to-face) research with customers is paramount to testing your assumptions and better understanding your market.
Explains the differences between high-quality research and a high-quality product, and why not every discovery is commercializable. An opportunity MUST demonstrate significant customer value to be successfully commercialized.
Presents a bottom-up approach to computing market size and strategy based on customer feedback and business model assumptions. This contrasts the top-down strategy which computes based on impersonal online figures.
Breaking down the process of defining customers using the Buying Center tool. A buying decision may involve the initiator of the purchase, the gate-keeper allowing the purchase to move forward, the decider and those who influence them, and the end user.
The Midwest I-Corps Node (MWIN) presents a three-step process for customer discovery.
- Create a stakeholder map for your industry.
- Define a testable hypothesis about individuals' behaviors in that ecosystem.
- Conduct customer discovery to test the hypothesis.
The Midwest I-Corps Node (MWIN) presents terminology identifying members of the business ecosystem relevant to your product - decision-makers, influencers, saboteurs, end-users, and more.