The document discusses the importance of customer development and adapting products based on feedback. It emphasizes that startups should use customer stories to guide products but be open to unexpected uses. Feedback should be collected through various methods like support emails and usability tests. Experiments provide insights but the key is studying users to identify new hypotheses. The author discusses examples from his company where they pivoted features, pricing, and demographic assumptions based on conversations that revealed unintended uses and customer needs. The takeaway message is that continuously talking to and learning from customers allows products and companies to coevolve successfully.

1. Customer Development Startup Lessons Learned Conference David E. Weekly (@dweekly) April 23, 2010

2. Quick Note (good thing I like bowling!)

3. Success is Adaptation Agile: use customer stories to guide product Good: solving specific problems. Bad: presumes specific uses. Lean: okay to be surprised at uses / users. It’s a continuous learning experience! So pivot – adapt to new uses / users. (you heard this earlier!)

4. Feedback: Breadth + Depth Data User Stories

5. Collecting User Feedback Support email Monthly sales pings In-product TEXTAREAs Phone calls UserTesting.com Onsite usability tests In-person visits

6. Key Learning Your experiments provide an oracle function. Good for testing hypotheses. But what hypotheses do you test? Study your users for hypothesis + inspiration.

7. Science or Art? From “What About Design” Panel… Science is an art. (Experiments rarely inform which hypotheses to test!)

8. Feature Pivot Being rightand $1 gets you on the bus. Make sure customers are empowered to succeed. WYSIWYG: didn’t offer it on purpose! WikiText: performant, robust, easy-to-learn. …but kept people from spreading it. (afraid their coworkers wouldn’t grok it!) Didn’t learn this until talking with them. So I ate my hat and delivered a WYSIWYG editor.

9. Demographic Pivot Sometimes you’ll be surprised at who actually shows up. So ask who they are! “We loved your presentation in Chicago!” Hunch: 5% educators? Interstitial => 45% educators. Jeebus. Surprise! We had made an educational product.

10. Pricing Pivot Duh = Align pricing with value. Crappy renewal rates from $/wiki. Accenture call, PeopleMaps interview Whoops, wikis = projects & Projects < year. Ok, so $/user and ∞ wikis = wiser. Didn’t realize this until we talked w/people about why they weren’t renewing. So we changed our pricing and design.

11. …and many other pivots! Ads = only beer $. Oops. “Wiki” = commodity. Oops. Folders & networks to organize & permission! Talk with your users. What they’re doing and who they are may surprise you.

12. The Good News Went from ASPs of $50 to $50,000+ by listening to customers and delivering value. We grew the product as customers grew their deploy – coevolution! You can succeed by continuing to better understand your customer.  Go do it!

13. Customer Development Startup Lessons Learned Conference David E. Weekly (@dweekly) April 23, 2010