4 ms·

We carpooled every day to get to know our customers

27 points by williswee 10y ago

saycheese 10y ago
Curious, has anyone ever seen a startup that does customer development as a service?
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  Is customer development still worth anything if a third party does it?
  - saycheese 10y ago
    Valid question, aware of it as a response to this question, but it doesn't address the orginal question. If there's a existing notable service doing customer developement as a service, the fact they exist might provide an answer to your question. Maybe one way to rephrase the question that might be more common might be: Is it okay as a co-founder to let another cofounder handle customer development if they're more experienced at doing it? Or as a non-technical founder, is it okay to outsource development? My experience is this is super common, and as such, if a solo founder is not experienced doing customer development, it would make sense at the very least get help doing customer development.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      Personally, I'd be delighted if somebody could convince me the answer to my question was "yes". But I'm staying skeptical. Specialized cofounders is a much less dangerous situation than outsourced core tasks. There are some events of companies failing or people getting really bad deals because the cofounders didn't all have the complete picture on their heads, but since they normally work in close contact and have the same interests, this is rare. Completely outsorcing those tasks completely remove both the proximity and interests alignment. Yet, I think you are right in that some service that would watch what I'm doing and tell me "now, you need to do X", "you should have done Y", or "don't ever do Z again!" would be valuable. I'd call that "tutoring", not "outsorcing", and I have no idea if somebody does it.
      - saycheese 10y ago
        My experience is the number one strength a founder has their passion. It's really not something that can easily be copied and given the vast amounts of opportunities in the world, hiring someone that really knows how to map that passion to a business model and attack the assumption has zero to do with being an entrepreneur, it's just another skill. Core issue is if the founder is not learning from the process and owning it. Anyway, it's a topic that's interesting to me given how bad most startups are at it.

27 points by williswee 10y ago

saycheese 10y ago

Curious, has anyone ever seen a startup that does customer development as a service?

marcosdumay 10y ago
Is customer development still worth anything if a third party does it?
- saycheese 10y ago
  Valid question, aware of it as a response to this question, but it doesn't address the orginal question. If there's a existing notable service doing customer developement as a service, the fact they exist might provide an answer to your question. Maybe one way to rephrase the question that might be more common might be: Is it okay as a co-founder to let another cofounder handle customer development if they're more experienced at doing it? Or as a non-technical founder, is it okay to outsource development? My experience is this is super common, and as such, if a solo founder is not experienced doing customer development, it would make sense at the very least get help doing customer development.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    Personally, I'd be delighted if somebody could convince me the answer to my question was "yes". But I'm staying skeptical. Specialized cofounders is a much less dangerous situation than outsourced core tasks. There are some events of companies failing or people getting really bad deals because the cofounders didn't all have the complete picture on their heads, but since they normally work in close contact and have the same interests, this is rare. Completely outsorcing those tasks completely remove both the proximity and interests alignment. Yet, I think you are right in that some service that would watch what I'm doing and tell me "now, you need to do X", "you should have done Y", or "don't ever do Z again!" would be valuable. I'd call that "tutoring", not "outsorcing", and I have no idea if somebody does it.
    - saycheese 10y ago
      My experience is the number one strength a founder has their passion. It's really not something that can easily be copied and given the vast amounts of opportunities in the world, hiring someone that really knows how to map that passion to a business model and attack the assumption has zero to do with being an entrepreneur, it's just another skill. Core issue is if the founder is not learning from the process and owning it. Anyway, it's a topic that's interesting to me given how bad most startups are at it.