This post was previously published on EIX.
In the early stages of a startup, assumptions about every part of the business model become deeply held beliefs. Think of deep beliefs as “strong opinions that are loosely held.”
You can’t be an effective founder or startup executive if you don’t have anything.
Here’s how I learned why these are important for successful customer development.
I was an aggressive, young, and very tactical vice president of marketing at Ardent, a supercomputer company, and I had no idea about the relationship between deep conviction, customer discovery, and strategy.
One day, my CEO called me into his office and asked me: “Steve, I’ve been thinking about this as a strategy going forward. What do you think?” And he proceeded to develop a fairly complex and innovative sales and marketing strategy for the next 18 months. “Yeah, that’s great,” I said. He nodded, then offered, “What do you think about this other strategy?” I listened intently as he weaved an equally complex alternative strategy. “Can you do both of these?” he asked, looking straight at me. I could tell by the angelic look on his face that I was hooked. I innocently replied, “Of course, I’ll do it right away.”
ambushed
Decades later, I still remember what happened next. Suddenly, the temperature in the room dropped by about 40 degrees. Out of nowhere the CEO started yelling at me. “You idiot X?!X. These strategies are mutually exclusive. Doing both would put us out of business.I have no idea what the purpose of marketing is because I’m just doing it. Give engineering a list of feature requests and run a series of tasks like a big to-do list.. If you don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, you’re at risk as a VP of Marketing. In reality, you’re just the titular head of marketing communications. You have no deep beliefs. ”
I walked away stunned, angry and confused. There was no question that my boss was an asshole, but I didn’t see the point. I was a great marketer. I took feedback from the customer, gave them a list of all the things they wanted from engineering, and told them these were the features they needed. We were able to execute any marketing plan that was handed to us, no matter how complex. In fact, I was implementing 3 different ones of hers. Ah…hmm…maybe I was missing something.
I was doing a lot of marketing “things”, but why was I doing them? The CEO was right. I viewed my activities simply as a list of tasks to accomplish. With my tail between my legs, I kept thinking, “What is the role of marketing in a startup?” And more importantly, what are deep beliefs and why are they important?
Assumptions about your business model = your deeply held beliefs are vaguely held
Your assumptions about every part of your business model are your deeply held beliefs.consider them to be loosely held strong opinions. You can’t be an effective founder or executive if you don’t have anything.
The entire customer discovery and verification role outside of the building. to make your deep beliefs known. “Informing” means using evidence gathered outside the building to test, invalidate, or modify one’s beliefs and assumptions. Specifically, what beliefs and assumptions do you have? Start with the customer regarding product/market fit. Who are the customers and what features do they want? Who are the payers? Then move forward with the rest of your business model. What price will they pay? What role does the regulatory authority play? and so on. The best validation you can get is an order. (By the way, if you’re creating a new market, it’s okay to ignore customer feedback, but you must be able to clearly explain why.)
The reality of startups is that most of your beliefs and assumptions are likely to be wrong on day one. However, experiments outside the building and data from potential customers, partners, regulators, etc. will lead to revisions to the vision over time.
It is helpful to diagram the consequences between hypothesis/beliefs and customer discovery. (see diagram)
if you have I don’t have any beliefs and I haven’t left the building. When gathering evidence, your role in the new venture is neutral. You act as an implementer of tactics because you add no insight or value to product development.
Even if you go outside the building to collect evidence, do not have deep beliefs to guide your questions, in which case your role within the new venture will be negative. You end up collecting a huge list of customer feature requests and feeding them to product development without any insight. This is essentially a denial of service attack on engineering time. (I was mostly working in this box when the CEO started to lash out at me.)
The biggest hurdle for startups is strong belief but I haven’t done it got out of the building To collect evidence. Meetings become a battle of ideas, and whoever has the loudest voice (or worse, “I’m the CEO, my opinions matter more than your facts”) controls the plans and strategy. (They may be right, but Twitter/X is an example of Elon in the box at the bottom right of the diagram.)
The winning combination is strong belief What is verified or corrected by evidence collected outside the building. These are “strongly held opinions.”
Strategy is not a to-do list drive To-do list
It took some time, but I started to realize the following: strategic Part of my job was to recognize that we were still searching for a scalable and repeatable business model (in today’s terminology). So my job was:
- Articulate the founding team’s strong beliefs and assumptions about our business model
- I do an internal check-in to see if a) the founders are on the same page and b) I agree with them.
- Get out of the building and test our strong beliefs and assumptions about who our potential customers are, what problems they have, and what their needs are.
- Use customer feedback to test product development/engineering beliefs about customer needs.
- Once product/market fit was found, marketing’s job was to put together a strategy/plan for marketing and sales. It should be easy. If we discover enough, our customers will tell us what features are important to them, how they compare to competitors, how we should price them, and how we can best sell to them. must.
Once I understood the strategy, my marketing tactical to-do list (website, branding, PR, trade shows, white papers, data sheets) became clear. This allowed me to prioritize what I would do and when, and instantly understand what was mutually exclusive.
lessons learned
- Deep beliefs are assumptions about every part of your business model.
- I don’t have a deep belief, but many customer discovery results in a collection of feature lists that are detrimental to product development.
- If you have deep beliefs but can’t find your customers, a battle of opinions will ensue and the loudest person will have the upper hand.
- The winning combination is strong belief What is verified or corrected by evidence collected outside the buildingThese are “strongly held opinions.”
Filed under: Customer Development |